The Greatest Show on Earth
by NotesFromUnderground
Summary: This is a sequel to my story 'He Who Pours Out Vengeance.' The laceration in Hannibal Lecter's gut isn't the only wound Will Graham left him. Alone, exposed, and imprisoned, Hannibal misses Will's company and embarks on a crusade to force Jack Crawford into reuniting them. Little does Hannibal know, he will soon get his wish - but not in the way he expects...
1. Chapter 1

A/N: This takes place after most of the events of He Who Pours Out Vengeance, which I wrote between Season 1 and Season 2 and is now firmly AU.

Here's what happened previously: Hannibal and Will played a long elaborate game of prison chess, which ended with Hannibal killing Alana, thereby revealing his nature to the world and liberating Will from the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Will thanked him for that by gutting him with a linoleum knife.

* * *

><p>When he first wakes up, he doesn't remember. His past is a haze. His present is a trap. Skeins of thought unravel in his mind, and in his mouth a taste not quite blood. Something sweeter. Not unlike the finish of a good Sauternes. He tries to speak around the mouthpiece of his ventilator, but to his shock the words he finds are from the native tongue in which he usually doesn't even think, let alone speak. The words roll over and die before they cross the boundary of his teeth. Overmastering her fear, the nurse removes the mouthpiece and leans in close to his lips. Into the vulnerable shell of her ear he whispers: "Will."<p>

They adjust his morphine, take him off the ventilator for good. Clarity returns, and with it time stretches forward and memory back. Clarity begets curiosity, but his means for satisfying it are limited. His vision is dim. There is nothing to hear except the faint sounds of traffic many stories below and the steady whirs and pulses of the mechanical vigil at his bedside. Smell is all he has. One of the guards outside his door favors chewing tobacco. The nurse uses lavender-scented face soap, a drugstore brand. He can smell his own sterilized skin and unwashed hair, but these are perfumes next to the stench of his injury.

His attending physician avoids his eyes as he gives Hannibal the barest summary of his condition. Nothing he hasn't already ascertained for himself. It has taken them three surgeries to repair the damage done to his large intestine and stomach, but his spleen is gone for good. Hannibal makes some polite inquiries on the methods and equipment used in his colostomy, lures his doctor into complacency, and then asks:

"Do you still have it?"

"Have what?"

"My spleen." He labors for comprehensibility, but try as he might his voice remains nothing but rumbles and squeaks.

"Why do you ask?" says his doctor, when he finally understands.

"I would like to see it."

The doctor's mouth falls open unattractively, which makes Hannibal's own mouth curve upwards a fraction.

"I've never seen one of my organs before. This is a rare opportunity. If you don't mind indulging me."

The doctor wheezes out something unapologetic about waste disposal and hospital policy before beating a retreat. They don't show Hannibal his spleen.

When Hannibal shuts his tired eyes, he imagines his hands wrapped around his doctor's spleen, the organ firm and richly purple. He enfolds it in Serrano ham and sage leaves, braises it in stock; slices the result in a russet spiral, garnishes with cornichons and spears of red onion. Perfect. Usually he would file such an imagining away for deliberation and later orchestration—but now he simply discards it. There is a strange new freedom in imagining things he no longer has the power to make material, in imagining purely for imagining's sake. The thought divorced from the action.

Shame about his spleen, though.

He remembers, very distantly, the soft fall of organs in his hands. As he lay on the rough floorboards in his borrowed clothes, he felt the curve of his large intestine caressing his palm—or had that been Will's hand in his? The mind plays tricks.

Will saw his organs. Witnessed the dark interior of his body. So did Jack.

There is Jack, standing by the door. Firmly rooted but uncertain, as if awaiting the moment when he has summoned the willpower to turn around and go.

"Jack," says Hannibal, elevating his bed as much as he can without causing himself additional agony. "Good to see you."

Jack says nothing.

"You're looking well."

These social niceties make no impact. Jack looms darkly, taut mouth shut. Hannibal schools his face into mild incomprehension, a mask for his amusement.

"Have you only come here to stare at me?"

"So that's how it's gonna be." Jack's voice is quiet. "Still playing this game."

"Game?"

"Pretending to be my friend."

"I was never pretending, Jack."

"Uh huh." Jack's expression is forbidding.

Hannibal expected Jack's reaction, of course. But what Hannibal did not expect is the pang of loss he experiences at seeing their friendship sundered. Hannibal relishes this feeling inside himself, examines it from every angle. Finds it very rare and interesting.

Jack is struggling with a similar pain. The pain of betrayal. It clings to him like a second skin, especially prominent in the creases of his shirt, the shadows in his eye sockets. He is five pounds thinner than when Hannibal last saw him. Jack has come here out of professional curiosity and personal vendetta: to pull back the veil and finally confront the monster behind it. So Hannibal resolves to give him nothing but the man.

He bows his head politely. "I'm sorry you have to see me in this state."

"I'm sorry, too."

"Because you'd rather see me cold and prone on a mortuary slab?" Hannibal smiles. "It's all right, Jack. We must learn to live with disappointment, and would you really have it any other way? Dreams cease being dreams when they come true. Tell me, how is Bella?"

A nerve well struck. Jack snaps: "You don't get to call her that."

"Phyllis, then."

Jack takes a step towards Hannibal, his head lowered like a charging bull's. "Are you being malicious," he asks, something like wonder in his voice, "or just delusional?"

"I'm being courteous," says Hannibal.

"You've killed forty-eight people. That we know about."

Hannibal cants his head, his polite listening face.

"Are there more? My gut tells me there's more."

A wistful hum from Hannibal. "I no longer have the luxury of consulting _my_ gut."

The joke falls flat as a corpse. And to think Jack used to laugh the loudest at the feeblest of Hannibal's little quips.

"You want to be courteous?" Jack says, eyes narrowed. "Then you help me out here. It's in your best interests if you're honest with me right now about the number of people you've killed."

Hannibal makes a show of ruminating on this, using the time to accustom himself to the way in which Jack is staring at him. He isn't used to being stared at in this manner, at least not by someone who isn't moments away from death. Will never looked at Hannibal like this; even at his most accusatory, there had always been the light of recognition in his eyes. But Jack stares at Hannibal as if Hannibal is a hitherto unknown creature belched out of the alien depths of the ocean, phosphorescent and ageless with spines and teeth dripping venom. Hannibal imagines he will be the object of stares like Jack's with some frequency henceforward. He finds he doesn't mind it.

He bathes in the silence until he can see Jack's patience ebbing. Then he says: "I'm not a sportsman, Jack. I don't keep score."

Jack's eyelids slip. He doesn't believe a word.

"And even if I did," Hannibal continues, "we can't have that conversation without my lawyer present."

Jack smiles now, bitterly. "I thought you wanted to be friends."

"It's nothing personal."

"Nothing personal?" Jack stalks forward almost to the foot of Hannibal's bed. "You served me human flesh at your dinner table, Dr. Lecter. In wine reductions. In soufflés. On toast points. You served it to me. You served it to my _wife_."

"I shared my predilections with all my friends."

"_Why_?"

Hannibal rolls the answer on his tongue for a good long moment. "It gives me pleasure watching others enjoy what I enjoy."

"It gives you pleasure perverting and destroying everything you touch."

A sad smile on Hannibal's face, one he hasn't consciously manifested there. "You don't understand."

"Then explain it to me."

"But you don't need _me _to explain it."

And with this, Hannibal's eyes score Jack's face, looking for anything, anything…

Jack's expression closes, but not fast enough.

"Ah." Hannibal turns away. Stares at a strip of sunlight caught between the window blinds. A note of weariness in his voice he can't disguise.

"He's already gone."

Predictable Jack goes bright-eyed with fury. "_He_ isn't your business any more."

"Neither is he yours," says Hannibal, still looking at the window. "Now that he has left the FBI. Become his own man."

Jack's jaw and fists clench. Physically grasping at the tattered edges of his patience. Clearly Will has become a verboten subject between them: and to think there was once a time when they discussed him almost exclusively.

"It's just you and me now," says Jack_._ "So work with me here. Explain yourself to me. Explain—explain why you killed Alana Bloom. Start there."

Hannibal draws a long breath, lets his eyelids slip down martyr-like. "I'm sorry, Jack."

Jack says nothing, but his nostrils flare.

"I can't explain that to you."

Jack rolls his eyes. "Not without your lawyer present."

"I can't explain it," says Hannibal, patient to a fault, "because I don't understand it myself."

Jack's eyebrows jump. "You don't understand it," he repeats dubiously. "_You_."

Hannibal is rueful, even as a part of him preens at the implicit compliment.

"I'm afraid I don't. No more than I can fathom the complexity of those great mysteries of nature: the origins of life, the sudden downfall of an ancient empire, the mass extinction of a hardy species. Chains of cause and effect stretching back into time immemorial, beyond my comprehension, beyond anyone's. Alana reaped the misfortune of having strayed into the convergence of those merciless forces beyond our ken that govern our lives. In my kitchen she and I stood at the center of a web comprised of chance and choice, factors and decisions, some of them hers, some of them mine, some of them…" Jack's nostrils flare again, so Hannibal lets the sentence trail. "How can I explain what happened, Jack, when I constitute but a part of it?"

"You could explain your part," says Jack, singularly unmoved by all this rhetoric.

"My part, on its own, is inadequate." Hannibal sighs now, not for show. If he is to be interrogated, he'd rather it not be about Alana. "I can't help you, Jack. I can't repair the damage done."

Jack's face is grim. "I'm not asking you to repair the damage done. I just want to understand the damage you did."

Hannibal scrutinizes Jack's face, nods in sympathy and respect for the emotion he sees there. "If you want to understand it, then there's only one thing you can do. You must reconstruct. Bring back together all those shattered parts that once comprised the fatal whole. Unfortunately Alana's part is lost to us. That leaves only mine…"

"And Will's," says Jack, his expression hardening to stone.

"The results would be illuminating," says Hannibal, mildly.

Jack takes this in. "You'll cooperate with my investigation if I put you and Will in a room together again, is that what you're telling me?"

Hannibal smiles.

Jack leans forward, smiles back—a cruel smile, calculating in its viciousness. "That. Is never. Going to happen."

Hannibal stops smiling. He says:

"A perilous word to use, 'never'. Tempts fate."

Now Jack leans forward, bracing his arms on the rails of Hannibal's hospital bed. He comes in so close their foreheads are almost touching—an act of considerable bravery, for Hannibal's teeth are as sharp as ever.

"I see I'm gonna have to make something clear to you, because apparently it isn't clear enough already. I don't care what you say, what you do, how much solid information you bargain with. You are never going to see Will Graham again. And when I say that, I'm not tempting fate—I am waging war against it. I am making it my personal mission to keep the two of you apart any and every way I can. That's a promise."

Jack's eyes are large and purposeful. Beautiful eyes. Hannibal looks into them and feels something like pity for Jack, damnably stubborn Jack, so dominated by his own guilt that he's trying to assuage it by putting himself between heaven and earth in the middle of a lightning storm. If he insists on standing there, then let him fry.

"You won't be able to keep that promise, Jack."

"Watch me." For one charged instant, Jack's fists tighten on the bedrails. Then he stalks from the room.

* * *

><p>Time passes in uncountable increments. The machines hooked to his body warble and tick, tick and warble. A chemical haze clings to everything. Hannibal sleeps when he doesn't mean to, wakes when he'd rather dream. He has no appetite.<p>

The nurses come regularly to change his bandages, irrigate his wound. They pull at his riven flesh in ways that make the cords stand out on Hannibal's neck. His eyes leak tears that run through the crevasses of gray, tightly drawn skin, the salt stinging when it comes into contact with the half-healed bite mark on his cheek. Where injuries meet injuries, a cascade of pain. Try as he might to retain his reason, he becomes a creature of pure feeling in these moments, overburdened as he is by indignities, by these mortifications of his flesh, this helplessness. Now he wishes—oh how he wishes—that the linoleum knife had been pointed on both ends.


	2. Chapter 2

Already he's adapting.

From day to day his palace grows in substance and in majesty. The walls climb. The stone hardens. The marble develops a pitiless sheen.

Past the vaulted heights of the foyer lies the main exhibit hall, its architecture a cross between the opulence of the Uffizi and the airiness of the Musée d'Orsay. Here his work is on display in frames, atop plinths, and under glass, each lit for maximum clarity and impact. Bone fragments gleam like pearls, blood sucks in light as greedily as does a Caravaggio. In an alcove _The Wound Man_ is mounted under a spectral spotlight, the work's distorted shadow thrown gargantuan against the wall behind it. In a discreet corner _The Lovers_ plight their troth beneath a bower of black onyx roses. _The Girl on the Stag_ is the stately centerpiece of a Spanish style fountain that marks the exact middle of the hall.

He walks with strength and purpose past these monuments, the soles of his Italian loafers clicking on the cold floor. He is counting doors; there are many in the main hall. All are entryways into galleries of other artists' work—paintings, sculpture, frescoes, tapestries—each of them keyed to a specific memory.

Hannibal's organizational methods are carefully crafted. Artistic movements and schools represent different periods of his life, their color and texture and violence encapsulating some defining aspect of his own experience. Over and over he visits the Mannerists, the Fauvists, the Ottoman textiles, the great masters of the Renaissance; he avoids the Byzantine and the Neoclassicists, is careful only to visit the Ukiyo-e prints on special occasions, delights in those memories inspired by the Greeks and the Egyptians; in moments of embarrassing nostalgia he enjoys the Pre-Raphaelites; in times of fury he indulges in the German Expressionists; he always takes great pleasure in the Confucian and Hindu, in the Romantics and Symbolists, and especially in the Baroque. The Baroque is where he stores his memories of those banner years of Baltimore, now ended. He is heading there presently.

In these beloved galleries the light lies thick and golden as the crust of a canelé. His attention is drawn to the soft curves of the Bernini sculptures, to the rich darknesses and grave white faces of those paintings by Vermeer and Velázquez. The musical accompaniment in these rooms is of course the _Goldberg Variations_, as played by an Iranian harpsichordist he once heard in concert in Milan. But other sounds leak out from particularly potent repositories of memory: fragments of intimate conversations, gunshots, a standing ovation, the rhythmic chopping of a carbon steel blade. He follows one particular aural thread—dogs barking. It leads him through a set of velvet curtains to a spiral staircase. At the top: a dark turret room, windowless, with an ecclesiastical hush. This is where he keeps his Rembrandts, and Will.

The eyes of the Self Portraits follow him as he does a circuit of the room. He glides past _The Night Watch_; past _The Slaughtered Ox_ and _The Anatomy Lesson_ (two of his special favorites); past _The Mill_, _The Descent from the Cross_, _The Storm on the Sea of Galilee_; past _Judas Repentant_ and_The Abduction of Proserpina_; past _St. Peter in Prison_ (precious encasement of many treasured memories), until he finally reaches the origin place of the barking dogs. To stand in front of this painting is to wallow in the din. The painting is _Abraham's Sacrifice_. Hannibal takes a moment to appreciate the drama of Abraham's arrested expression; the falling dagger; the cruelty and gentleness of the father's hand splayed over the entirety of his son's face; the pale expanse of Isaac's unmarked skin. When he has looked his fill, Hannibal steps inside the masterwork, veers around the frozen tableau, and dives deep into the rock-strewn forest that serves as the painting's backdrop. In the distance he sees the farmhouse, a purplish huddle against the orange sky. Here lies Wolf Trap.

Hannibal can live inside a memory as an active participant or as a detached observer; he can even double his awareness and be both at once. For now he is content to recreate, to be as he was then: the man of spent violence awaiting a homecoming.

He sits in the frayed armchair in Will's living room, measuring time via the _click click click_ of the linoleum knife against his knee. He is almost outside himself with anticipation. His thoughts are so saturated with blood and hope that they soon reach a pitch too agonizing to bear. He finds relief in becoming Will for a time. Will, about to cross the threshold of this little house for the first time in months. Hannibal tries to see the room as Will will see it: the mélange of familiar objects and the strange empty spaces left by those of his possessions the FBI has removed. These shapes and smells are Will's and yet Will's no longer. In his absence his territory has reverted back to No Man's Land. But no, that's not so. This land has a new claim: Hannibal's, as he has spent so many of his hours here, not only today but cumulatively over the course of Will's institutionalization. Hannibal has memorized these walls and corners, left footprints in the dust, stared out of the misted windows as if scrying for a ghost. Yes, it's unmistakable: he looks at the room through Will's eyes and sees traces of himself.

Headlights cut through the dark, throwing across Hannibal's face the gridded shadow of the window.

Will.

Hannibal turns his head a fraction, watches him emerge from the car and gather his dogs from the van. Jack strides after Will, but stops before he reaches him. They talk to each other from opposite sides of the driveway. The tension in Jack's back shouts out his desperation even from this distance, but Will is harder for Hannibal to read: are his fists, white-knuckled around the dogs' leashes, a sign of distress or defiance? Does he spy solidity or surrender in the faraway curve of his shoulders?

Hannibal's consciousness shifts, and the Hannibal of Wolf Trap briefly transforms into the Hannibal of Maryland Misericordia Hospital. He realizes he should have known, at this moment, that something was amiss: Will's inner life was not usually so closed to him. Hannibal of Wolf Trap understood this scene to be the parting of the ways between Will and Jack, but Hannibal of Maryland Misericordia realizes it is something different: a preparation for battle.

He puts hindsight away and returns to the memory unfolding. Will stands in the cheerful crush of dogs as he watches Jack drive off, the receding taillights momentarily casting him in a bloody light. After the cars disappear, he remains where he is, unmoving. What thoughts now effervesce inside that wonder of a mind? Hannibal wishes he were closer, is almost tempted to press himself against the windowpane in an effort to _see_.

The spell breaks; Will unfreezes. He leads the dogs up to the porch. Sounds of him unsealing and unlocking the door, the scuffling of the dogs excited by the familiar smells of the house. Will crosses the threshold of the darkened room. He doesn't see Hannibal immediately. But Hannibal sees him.

Will is altered. The shock of Alana has wrought in him a change that is both subtle and total. It is as if an entire layer of his skin has been ripped away, and the translucent remainder exposes everything tender and unspeakable inside him. Now Hannibal can perceive within Will a clear light struggling to burn. Though it has been whipped by wind and stifled by rain, the light burns on, suffusing Will's face and hands in a rare glow. Previously Hannibal had only glimpses of this light, enough to know of its existence but nothing more. But now the barrier between Hannibal and Will—which over time, with testing and with force, eroded down to almost nothing—that film of gossamer has been finally and irrevocably breached, and in its collapse this light is now made plainly visible to Hannibal. Is this why he killed Alana? To bring about this miraculous thing, this metamorphosis? Hannibal wonders if her death has worked a similar transformation in himself. He would need Will's eyes to tell.

(And the Hannibal of Maryland Misericordia wonders if this too is an act: this light, this woundedness. But no, how could a thing this startling, this private, be anything but real? It is possible the light was the only true thing Will chose to show him that evening.)

When Will finally sees him, the light flickers.

"You're inside my house," he says.

Hannibal interprets this as a question, and answers it by not answering it.

Not good enough for Will. "You're inside my house," he says again.

(With his wiser eyes, the Hannibal of Maryland Misericordia scrutinizes Will and deems his expression a very fine approximation of surprise. So fine it's probably genuine. For all Will's knowledge, his predictions, the hair-trigger accuracy of his imagination, he is still surprised to find Hannibal here. Surprised to be proven right.)

"_Why_ are you inside my house?" By the trembling scope of Will's voice, Hannibal understands that he is posing this question to God, not to Hannibal. Which is why Hannibal deigns to answer it.

"I like your house."

He hopes the banality of this statement will shock Will, and it does. Will's eyes, always wide, go wider still.

Hannibal remains doubly aware as the scene plays out. He fancies that beneath Will's shock he can sense him readying himself for the next play, and the play after that—but this may be Hannibal's imagination. There isn't even so much as a hairline crack in Will's mask.

"_I want you out of my house_!" he shouts broken-voiced, pointing at the door.

But in the end he has to accept that Hannibal is really there, and will remain there for as long as Hannibal wishes. Will makes this acceptance seem like an effort it's not. His performance is seamless, but that doesn't stop Hannibal from trying to work his fingers into the seams to rip the suit apart. He wishes he could stand up, extinguish the distance between himself and Will, look right into Will's eyes and see through the performance once and for all. But that would destroy the integrity of the memory.

Instead he sticks to the script, bids Will to follow him to the back porch where they secure the dogs together. Will obeys without a peep. Hannibal tests him by leaving Will alone on the porch for a minute, and is gratified when he doesn't attempt escape. He knows Hannibal's mind perfectly, understands a struggle would be messy and useless. (And what would be the point, when Will set and baited this trap before he even stepped through the threshold of his house? He can afford to look innocent now; he has dignity enough to feign defeat.)

The two of them reconvene inside the kitchen.

"When did you last eat?" Hannibal asks him.

"No," says Will.

Hannibal takes this as an invitation to make him eggs. And all the while Hannibal of Maryland Misericordia uses his eyes to screw an auger of curiosity into Will. Will looks back at him, his eyes unblinking and almost robbed of color as they follow Hannibal's every move. Looking at them, Hannibal can't divine even the smallest detail of Will's true intentions. It is like staring into a mirror that reflects nothing—an insatiable void that, having swallowed all available light, reflects only darkness.

Will refuses the food Hannibal gives him. He does more than that. He flings the flatware against the wall: first his own plate, then Hannibal's. When Hannibal still won't wield the linoleum knife, Will appropriates it instead, wrenches hard at Hannibal's hair as he holds the tip of the blade to his cheek.

(An act, all an act, every part of it an act.)

Hannibal looks up into Will's face, feels against his skin the hot insistency of Will's breath, the linoleum knife twitching in the narrow space between them. Will is giving Hannibal what he knows Hannibal expects to see. If he had eaten and remained calm, if he had followed Hannibal's instructions and appeased Hannibal in every respect, then eventually Hannibal would have recognized the lie for what it was. So instead Will gives him this fury like a baited hook for Hannibal to swallow. How tempted he is to swallow it, even now.

"You had a choice," Will rages. "I didn't. You chose to kill her. That was all you. You can't put this on me. I won't take it."

"You already have," says Hannibal.

And the knife comes closer, resting against his bandaged cheek. Hannibal removes the bandage from his bite to diffuse Will's anger. Confronted by the evidence of his own destructiveness, Will abandons violence (for now) and sits back down at the table.

The briefest flash of something maybe real when Hannibal tells Will what he assumed at the time to be true: that Will has retired from the FBI and refused Jack's offer of joining Hannibal's manhunt.

As Will asks, "What makes you think I rejected Jack?" all of the emotion on his face disappears, and for a heartbeat it is revealed to be the calculated mask that it is. The Hannibal of Wolf Trap mistook Will's reaction for a stricken nerve, but the Hannibal of Maryland Misericordia knows this moment is in actuality Will's test for Hannibal, just as out on the back porch Hannibal had tested Will. Will wants to see if Hannibal has taken the bait. He wants to ascertain just how hooked is his fish.

"You came home early," Hannibal tells him. "Without your gun. And I was watching you when you talked with Jack in your driveway. He had the look of a man struggling under the weight of disappointment."

(Ah, poor ignorant Hannibal of Wolf Trap, patiently enumerating all the ways in which Will has already succeeded in fooling him. The fish is very hooked indeed.

He appreciates Will's bravery now. To walk into this house unarmed, in full knowledge of what awaited him inside. Exposing himself and his dogs to the danger Hannibal poses to them. How could Will have known Hannibal wouldn't hurt them? How could Will have known anything for certain, when Hannibal so often finds himself to be an unknowable quantity? Does Will know something about Hannibal that Hannibal is unaware of in himself?)

_Click click click_, the linoleum knife rocks against Will's knee.

Hannibal attempts to get through to Will, to guide him gently towards his desired outcome for this meeting. Methodically he invalidates every path open to Will—the FBI, boat motors—steering him towards the only remaining avenue that leads to freedom. Will won't hear it. He rages again. Throws down the linoleum knife in front of Hannibal. Not surrender—a rebuke. And then he storms back into the living room.

"I don't need this!" he shouts. "I don't fucking need this! Do what you came here to do. I'm through talking to you."

Hannibal looks down at the linoleum knife. Brave strange Will, as perverse as Hannibal, returning him this weapon.

And now Will is alone in the living room, unwatched for a few precious seconds. (What does he use them for? Does he slip the mask off? Does he send Jack a message, confirming the fish has taken the bait? Here Hannibal pushes against his recollection's boundaries: he can't know for certain what transpired in the other room. No matter how many times he replays this memory, that information is lost to him.)

Hannibal takes the linoleum knife and follows Will. There he is, in the same chair Hannibal was sitting in all afternoon. His shoulders are bowed, his face in his hands; every line of him now screams defeat.

"Freedom," Will mutters. "Hilarious, how much you love talking about my freedom. You, of all people, have no interest in me being free."

"That's all I've ever wanted for you."

"You put me in a cell!"

"Yes."

"And you don't see a contradiction there?"

"No."

The light in Will is pulsing now, as if trying to escape the corded confines of his body. From the safety of his old armchair he looks up at Hannibal, hands cupped in his lap, eyebrows drawn, an unspoken plea on his lips. A flood of desperate longing is building up inside Hannibal—inside both Hannibals. Wolf Trap wants to save Will, Maryland Misericordia wants to be him.

"I never put you in prison," Hannibal says, and he finds his throat tight, the vocal chords struggling, as if he is approaching the limit of words allotted him. "I set you free."

"I…don't…feel…_free_."

The light is brightening, brightening. Hannibal, a moth drawing closer and closer to the flame. He kneels before Will, grasps his arm, but Will can't stand to be touched and pulls away, ducking out of Hannibal's reach.

"You don't make people better," he cries, up and pacing the living room like a captured animal. "You destroy them. You are a monster. _A. Monster_."

His voice is thick with violence of the most intimate flavor. It isn't loathing. It's self-loathing. It makes Hannibal's whole body pound with feeling.

"I'm not a monster, Will."

Will laughs brutally at this.

"'Monster' is a word people use for something they can't understand. But you understand me."

"Well," says Will, with a half-hearted shrug that tears at Hannibal, "I guess I'm a monster too."

It's the crux of the matter. Tears streak Will's face. The light in him is now so bright it's becoming hard to look at. (And how can this be an _act_? How can something so raw and unguarded be a fiction? Hannibal doesn't pursue this line of questioning. Maryland Misericordia has stopped analyzing; now Maryland Misericordia is just along for the ride.)

He wants Will to stay like this forever, quaking with the pain of being pushed to his limits. Will in extremity has always been indescribably beautiful to him. Hannibal yearns to tell him so. Hannibal wants to capture his feelings for Will under a yoke of words, a last ditch effort to control them. The descriptive language he finds is not quite right, doesn't capture the essence. His chest feels tight, his body locking up around this deluge of emotion. He clings to what he knows and to what he now must do. Take Will with him. Run away.

He broaches the topic, demonstrates his sincerity by dropping the linoleum knife. (A tactical error, the effects of which Hannibal is still feeling, though the pain of his injury can't reach him in the palace). The bright swoop of Will's eyes as he tracks the path of the weapon, but in an instant his attention is back on Hannibal, as if the knife's location is of no interest to him.

"Come with me," says Hannibal.

"You've been so lonely," Will says, his voice faraway, swept up in Hannibal's current, "for so long."

"So have you."

"And you think this will help?"

"_Yes_."

Again Hannibal draws closer to Will. He wants to say something eminently persuasive, the crowning glory of his argument, a final push that might render his offer undeniable. But for once in his life, the words won't come.

He is very close now. A tear clings to Will's eyelashes. Hannibal wonders if he is close enough for the light to shine on Hannibal also, if he might in some way reflect its radiance. He wonders if it is possible to get so close that he might feel its heat. He leans in, wanting to feel it, needing to taste it, his lips to Will's, taking Will's breath for his own as if by doing this he might coax the light out with the breath, draw all of it into his own body with the suction of his tongue and his teeth and his insurmountable desire.

Will molds himself against Hannibal, kisses him back. Unexpected.

And then the dogs are barking.

Hannibal breaks the kiss. The mask is gone, the performance over. (Encore encore.) The real Will looks at Hannibal with victory shining in his eyes, and from there it is a short leap to what happens next: their struggle, the crack of Will's breaking wrist, the race for the linoleum knife. But the contest has already been decided, was decided from the moment Hannibal broke the kiss, looked at Will, and _understood_. It was then that Will really stuck the knife in him.

_Click click click_. Linoleum knife tapping at a kneecap. But that can't be: the linoleum knife is currently lodged in Hannibal's guts as Will saws and saws and saws.

_Click click click_. An electronic chime sounding. These sounds aren't native to the memory palace.

A disorienting wrench as Hannibal abandons Wolf Trap. As a rule he tries to avoid exiting his palace without first retracing his steps through the galleries, the main hall, and the foyer, but this time an exception must be made.

Under the blanket his wound is throbbing, and where it doesn't throb it itches: a sign of healing, but nonetheless very hard to tolerate.

_Click click click_.

Hannibal doesn't move or alter the rhythm of his breathing, but he cracks his eyes a sliver.

A nurse in full surgical scrubs is standing near the wall opposite his bed. Her face is obscured by her paper mask, her red curls buried under her bouffant cap. She is standing well back from him in order to get the widest possible angle with her camera. _Click click click_ goes the shutter.

"Miss Lounds," says Hannibal, and with a gasp she jerks and ruins her shot, "up to your old tricks, I see."

Her eyes widen above her mask. She reaches up, pulls it under her chin. "How did you know it was me?"

"The operating rooms are in the other wing, your manicure is hardly compatible with the duties of a surgical nurse, and you are taking photographs of me without my permission, which I consider to be very rude."

Freddie Lounds doesn't look chagrined in the slightest. "I don't need your permission for photographs, Dr. Lecter. You're in the public eye now. Exposed for all to see. Say cheese."

This time the flash goes off. Hannibal has the courtesy to smile, faintly. "I am resigned to my role as a public figure," he says. "Though this is not the exposure I had in mind."

"It isn't for you to decide how you're represented, Hannibal the Cannibal." She lowers the camera with a smirk.

"Is that what you're calling me?"

"Oh, I've been calling you a lot of things. But I admit 'Hannibal the Cannibal' is my favorite. I've always been susceptible to a good rhyme. Don't you like it?"

As it happens, Hannibal does like it, though not for any of its intrinsic qualities; he merely has affection for it because of the circumstances in which he first heard it spoken: in a back room of the Baltimore State Hospital in the dead of night.

He doesn't tell Freddie any of this, obviously.

"I consider the levity distasteful. But it's better than 'The Chesapeake Ripper'."

"What's wrong with 'The Chesapeake Ripper'?" Freddie asks, avid eyes focused on him. She was not expecting this, Hannibal awake and receptive to talk. But she hides her surprise well, and pushes the conversation forward for all she's worth.

"Derivative," sniffs Hannibal, simply.

"And you're nothing but original, huh?"

"I try to be."

He regards her carefully, and she returns his stare without fear. He recognizes her curiosity, applauds it. She is attempting to place this invalid she beholds in front of her, comparing him with both the erudite man of her previous acquaintance and the prolific killer whose doings she so faithfully recounted on her blog. He is neither of those men, and both.

"I hear you're going to live," she says, finally.

"So they tell me. They have saved my life so they might take my freedom from me."

Freddie crosses her arms against her chest. "It's more than you deserve."

Hannibal tilts his head. "Judging me so quickly, Miss Lounds?"

"You killed someone I cared about. And you killed Alana Bloom, whom I always respected, self-righteous goody two-shoes though she might have been."

The faintest smile from Hannibal. "So you haven't forgiven her for escorting you out of the Baltimore State Hospital?"

"'Escorting' me?" Freddie scoffs. "She threw me down the front steps. I could have filed charges."

"She was protecting Will Graham. You weren't on his approved visitors list."

"Well, now I know why you didn't try to stop her. Couldn't have me talking to Will Graham. You'd have been running the risk that I might have actually _listened_ to him."

"That would have been inconvenient," Hannibal agrees.

Freddie smiles, taking these words as the compliment they are. Her bright bird's eyes skate downward, from his face to his body. "They say you were gutted like a fish—is that true?"

"See for yourself." And without hesitation Hannibal throws back the blanket to reveal the whole sorry package: his wound, the dressing, the tubing, the drain.

Freddie's mouth drops open just a little. Her fingers tighten around her camera.

"Will Graham did that," Hannibal says solemnly, "with a linoleum knife."

Freddie can't stifle the reflex to raise the camera.

"You won't have a good angle from there," says Hannibal. "Why don't you come closer? I promise I won't bite."

It's too good an offering to refuse. She edges forward, eyes wide, though what threat can he pose her, weakened as he is, tied down by IV lines and catheters? But this show of fear delights him. She raises her camera as a barrier between them, takes photo after photo of his colostomy bag.

"Take one of my face," says Hannibal.

She looks up, features drawn with excitement and alarm, predator and prey intermingled.

He encourages her with a nod.

She raises the camera, frames the shot. He stares into the lens, unsmiling, but lets a bit of life flare up in his eyes. _Click_.

"Why are you being so cooperative?" Freddie asks him, and she can't purge the discomfort from her voice.

"The way I see it, we're in the same business."

Her eyebrow lifts. "Criminal justice journalism?"

Hannibal dismisses this with a look. "You and I are nature's opportunists, Miss Lounds. We both feed off murder." And before she can protest, "Also I must confess, I have always been an avid fan of your website. You've enjoyed my work unapologetically, and your writing communicates that enjoyment to your readers."

"Well," says Freddie, a little at a loss, "I'm flattered."

"For obvious reasons I haven't been able to make my appreciation public, so I have had to find ways to communicate it to you privately."

She cocks her head. "Is this the moment when you confess to being 'A Modest Proposer'?"

"Yes," says Hannibal, a little miffed she has beaten him to the punch.

"Jonathan Swift." Freddie chuckles. "You really think you're hilarious, don't you? So you were my informant. My insider on the Chesapeake Ripper investigation. The information you shared with me was invaluable, I must admit, though now that I know you were the Chesapeake Ripper all along, I'm annoyed you didn't give me a lot more than you did. But still, you helped me light a bonfire under Jack Crawford and I'm appreciative of that."

"I'm happy to hear it," says Hannibal. He is enjoying this: finally being able to take credit for his doings. The opportunity to speak to Freddie Lounds with almost-honesty. There is an airy relief in this freedom of expression. It was the one freedom he lacked when he was on the outside, and now it is the only freedom left to him. Will the trade be worth it? Time will tell.

After a moment he says: "I'd like to ask you for a favor."

"I'm listening," says Freddie, eyes wary, though Hannibal can tell she is mentally performing a cost/benefit analysis.

"The last photo you took," he says. "May I see it?"

She just blinks at him.

"The photo of my face. Would you mind showing it to me?"

Her fingers tighten on the body of the camera. She senses a ploy. "Why?"

"I don't have a mirror," says Hannibal.

Slowly she approaches him, completely guarded, clutching the camera to her chest. If she valued her life above all, she might have handed him the camera and backed away. But Freddie values the story more than her life; she can't surrender the camera to him for fear he might delete the pictures. Instead she leans down next to him so that she is almost resting on his pillow, and holds the camera display out in front of both of them.

"A little closer, please."

She brings the screen nearer his face. He focuses his eyes on the bright pixels. Is that him? That skeleton with sunken eyes and gray bristles of beard? His skin is like crumpled paper; he looks fleshless, older, a stone's throw from death. A stranger even to himself.

"What do you see?" Freddie asks him, not quite gently.

Hannibal isn't prepared to answer. "What do you see?" he asks instead.

Her answer is immediate. "A monster."

"A monster," he repeats, considering it. "Very well. Thank you."


	3. Chapter 3

At the end of his third week of wakefulness, his doctors reverse his colostomy. His innards are his own again, for all the good they do him. He can manage only soft food: broth, applesauce, gelatin, and a saccharine slop the nurse informs him is 'tapioca pudding.' As he forces down a tasteless spoonful he thinks of gazpacho, vichyssoise, congee, and panna cotta; what a paucity of imagination that the best they can do for him is this 'tapioca.' But he eats whatever they bring, leaves his plastic tray picked clean. He needs his strength. The pain is worse now that he is without the steady drip of liquid morphine.

He journeys to the bathroom with the aid of a walker and two nurses. Try as he might he can't unbend his spine from its thirty-degree angle, his legs tremble, and every sharp breath catches in his wound, but he makes it, red-faced and grunting. Once he's there, he hardly has the strength to use the facilities he has so pushed himself to reach.

Even with a railing and a stool he still requires the nurses' help to wash. Their touch on his irritated skin is impersonal but gentle, and although he tells himself this may be the last human contact he experiences that isn't colored by revulsion, his pride still smarts at being so obviously in need of assistance, at having his emaciated body exposed for the nurses to see and handle. Perhaps it was better when he was fully invalided, too weak to raise his head. It had been easier, then, to embrace the limits imposed by his condition. But this halfway state is maddening, his independence close enough to tantalize while still being outside his shaky reach.

Once he is clean, the nurses remove the waterproof dressing around his midsection. For the first time he sees his wound in all its glory. An angry slash from his right hipbone all the way across his abdomen, curving up to notch his ribcage on the left side, where it meets the incision left by the surgeons in the removal of his damaged spleen. Hannibal traces the staples with his fingertips, mapping the wound until he reaches the precipitous jut of his ribs.

"A fine piece of work," he says quietly.

The nurses assume he is complimenting the surgeons.

"You're very lucky," Marta tells him. "Stab wound like that, never seen anything like it before."

"You were almost in two pieces when they brought you in," say Elodia, as she unwinds more gauze. "And now you're our very own medical miracle."

A medical miracle. Imagine that. Hannibal manages a brave smile for his nurses. Despite their better judgment, both women have grown fond of him. He has survived the astronomical odds while being neither moody nor demanding; he speaks to them in their native languages, asks after their children, and suffers greatly in the politest of silences. Whatever he might have done in his former life, however villainous he's being painted now, to these nurses he is nothing but a model patient.

The guards aren't so well disposed towards him. Now that Hannibal looks unlikely to die, the FBI agents insist on putting him in restraints whenever possible, an absurd precaution when he barely has the power to stand. They watch him with paranoiac fervor, refusing to answer any of his questions and forbidding him access to newspapers, television, computer, or phone. The guards chastise the nurses for even talking to him, so intent are they on their dehumanization campaign. Clearly they intend to stew him in his own boredom—but they don't know about the memory palace.

He spends most of his time there, reliving succulent meals, magnificent operas, conversations with perfumed women, moonlit strolls along the Arno. Often he is content simply to wander the galleries, admiring the artwork that contains his memories. Sometimes he doesn't get past the main exhibit hall, where he remains for hours reveling in his own bloody artistry.

But the greatest portion of his time in the memory palace he spends in Wolf Trap. Over and over he replays the memory from beginning to end, enduring the trauma of his evisceration for the sake of everything that precedes it: the light, the tears, the kiss. These happenings are not a comfort so much as they are a puzzle he feels he has to solve. If only he could sound the depths of Will's performance, expose the truth that lies at its very bottom. Then he might find some peace.

Wolf Trap is his best distraction in those moments when he needs an escape. Such escapes have never been more necessary, for his physical therapy has begun. He is prescribed long painful walks up and down the hallway of the secure ward, always under the supervision of both guards and nurses. Hannibal's progress is much slower than he'd like. He aches all the time now, not only his wound but also the atrophied muscles of his arms, legs, and back. Every day he has to relearn the limits of his graceless body, and he is always surprised when exhaustion descends on him suddenly, brutally. He sweats and trembles, the walker taking most of his weight, but as his body suffers these indignities, his mind remains in Wolf Trap.

* * *

><p>This time they tell him he need go no further than the nurses' station, but Hannibal pushes himself further than that, puffing hard, propelling the walker forward in creaky micro-steps so the staples won't pull at him so much. Meanwhile Will sits with grim anticipation at the kitchen table, watching as Hannibal makes eggs.<p>

He says, "What you mourn is the loss of your possessions, your comfortable life of lavishness and luxury."

"I haven't the slightest feeling about the life I left behind," Hannibal corrects him. "It was a dream I enjoyed the dreaming of. Now I am awake."

His IV stand squeaks as Elodia wheels it after him, lathering him with encouragement, which Hannibal pretends to appreciate. The two guards flank him, glaring, as if silently accusing Hannibal of feigning his weakness to lull them into the illusion of security. Alas, it's not an act. Hannibal wishes it were. He wishes he were concealing from the guards vast reserves of unguessed strength. But he can't afford to hold anything back during these sessions. He must test his endurance systematically, mercilessly, if he is ever to regain his power.

In Wolf Trap Will is crying. "The only reason I can't go back to the FBI—can't go back to boat motors—is because you've ruined me. You've ruined me for doing anything else."

"I haven't ruined you," Hannibal says, emotion rearing up in him, muffling his exhaustion in the outer world.

"You have." Will's lips quiver. "You have."

Hannibal is so enraptured that it takes him a moment to realize that Elodia has stepped aside to talk to an attendant, and that one of the FBI agents is leaning into Hannibal's personal space, speaking in his ear as Hannibal continues prodding the walker forward.

"You know," says the agent—he's the one with chewing tobacco on his breath—"Eric Rutgers was my friend."

Hannibal throws the man a sidelong glance, but his attention remains on Will, pacing desperately in his living room, his face twisting in agony as he says: "You don't make people better. You destroy them. You are a monster. A. Monster."

In Maryland Misericordia Hospital, the agent steps in front of Hannibal's walker. "He was one of my oldest friends at the Bureau."

Who was? Oh, this man Rutgers. Hannibal could step out of Wolf Trap, return to the Baroque galleries of his memory palace and retrieve the information regarding the identity of Eric Rutgers and Hannibal's part in his death, but Hannibal isn't interested in making these connections at the present moment. He would rather step closer to Will, press his lips to Will's, breathe Will in and make Will his.

But the guard won't let him be. "I was the best man at his wedding. And now his wife—well, she's a mess. Thanks to you."

His voice is like the persistent buzzing of a fly: meaningless droning but impossible to ignore completely. Hannibal pulls himself out of the memory palace just long enough to favor this pest with an expression of dismissal.

"Agent Rutgers," he says (for now he has placed the name: Rutgers was half of the protective detail assigned to Hannibal after Beverly Katz's faked assault; a well-trained agent, considerate of Hannibal's time and space, Rutgers's only flaw had been an unchecked obsession with automobiles—fascinated by the Bentley, he had pelted Hannibal with all manner of questions about its engine and performance, to the point of becoming something of a nuisance, so it was with an unhesitating ruthlessness that Hannibal, upon arriving home and realizing Alana was inside his wine cooler, immediately severed Rutgers's spinal cord with one clean break), "was in my way."

Which makes the guard widen his eyes, stunned both by the baldness of this statement and by Hannibal's suddenly acute stare.

"Just as you are in my way now," continues Hannibal. He curbs the walker past the agent with an emphatic grunt, and without further adieu he goes back to Wolf Trap. The dogs are barking and Will has just revealed himself, cold calculation in his expression, the light within him shining bright.

"You were lying to me," whispers Hannibal, hardly believing it even now.

"Role-playing," Will declares, and begins reading Hannibal his rights.

Meanwhile Hannibal's guard gives a low rasp of fury. "Then guess I better get out of your way," he says, and as he takes a step backwards, he kicks the walker sideways. Hannibal, still in Wolf Trap, doesn't notice the walker's new position in time, and he reaches for a means of support that is no longer there.

He slips. He falls, his IV toppling down after him with a terrible screech. Hannibal's chin and stapled abdomen smack against the vinyl floor, his bony knees bouncing hard, his toes curling. Pain like an electrical storm inside him. The nurse screams.

In Wolf Trap he slips, too.

As he and Will both reach for the linoleum knife, Hannibal's control over the memory stutters, only for a blink of any eye, but that blink changes everything. Hannibal's hand fixes around the hilt of the knife. He clutches it in front of him, grabs Will by the throat, and before he is even aware of the magnitude of this reversal, his violent momentum carries him forward and he thrusts himself against Will, pins him to the wall, and plunges the knife into him.

"Oh," says Will, an almost dreamy exhale. His eyes glaze over. He doesn't seem to understand.

Neither does Hannibal, but he keeps slicing sideways, opening up Will's belly one inch at a time. Will reaches up uncertainly, touches Hannibal's elbow, whether trying to stop him or encourage him Hannibal cannot tell. He curves the knife up, cuts straight through Will's bowels until the blade hooks around the hard bone of his ribcage. It's a mirror image of the wound Will was supposed to have given him.

Will's chin drops. He presses his wet face into Hannibal's shoulder, wheezing.

"There now," gasps Hannibal. "There now."

Will moans against him.

"It's over. It's all right. Nothing to fear any more."

He can feel Will's lips moving against the meat of his shoulder. "Hannibal…" he whispers. "How…does it taste?"

And Hannibal, as if waiting for this signal, pulls the knife out of him. Will winces, stays conscious long enough to watch Hannibal as he licks Will's insides off the blade. Then Will collapses into him.

People shouting, strong hands clutching his shoulders, turning him over, the urgent shriek of his IV stand being pulled upright. Smears of blood on the yellow vinyl.

Hannibal catches Will before he can fall, holds him tightly. He presses Will's wound against his chest as if he might use his own flesh to keep Will's together, as though by close contact they might share this wound and its attendant suffering. And even as Jack enters the house and shouts at him to step away, Hannibal refuses to part himself from Will. Surrounded by shotguns, blasted with searchlights, deafened by helicopter rotors, Hannibal still keeps his hold. He won't let Will fall. Never.

"Can you hear me?" Elodia is asking him. "Dr. Lecter? Breathe now. Breathe."

And Misericordia knows this is no longer quid pro quo, tit for tat, reciprocity. When Will finished gutting him, he dropped Hannibal, flung him away like a thing separate from himself, untethered, discarded. But heedless of the asymmetry he is now creating, Hannibal keeps Will close, one of his hands still clutching the linoleum knife, its flat side pressing harmlessly against Will's back. Hannibal touches his face to the skin of Will's neck so that he can feel Will's pulse beating out its litany against Hannibal's cheek, Will's indefatigable heart still pumping blood through his arteries only for it to drain out of his wound and on to Hannibal, drenching him. He watches as Will's eyes slip shut, the light inside him guttering, flickering, fighting for life and then growing dim—

Hannibal can't hang on. It's too much, the pain too great. The nurses have him on a gurney now. There's blood in his mouth, blood dripping from where the IV ripped out of his arm, blood oozing from the staples in his gut. His hospital gown is twisted up, revealing his wasted thighs shuddering with the aftershocks of pain. Elodia notices his nakedness and hurries to straighten the gown. Hannibal feels grateful to this woman, who takes the time even in emergency to preserve his dignity. The FBI agent makes a show of stepping back to give the nurses room to work. He looks appalled by what he's done, and yet his mouth is frozen in a smirk.

Hannibal catches the guard's unrepentant eye. He wonders if the man carries a business card.

* * *

><p>There are tests for concussion, ultrasounds to check for internal bleeding, consultations with his surgeons who remove and replace some of the staples. Eventually the doctors pronounce him undamaged by his fall, but the physiotherapist eases back on the length and frequency of Hannibal's walks and lectures him on the dangers of pushing himself too far too soon. Marta bandages his new wounds, switches Hannibal's IV to the other arm, and his recovery continues apace.<p>

He isn't interested in any of these mundanities. The physical aftermath of his fall can't be helped and doesn't much concern him. He isn't even particularly troubled by the continued presence of the FBI agent responsible for his inglorious tumble. Patrick Green (Elodia is kind enough to inform him of the man's name) continues to treat Hannibal with hostility, his thirst for vengeance unslaked by his actions in the hallway. Hannibal feels no answering thirst within himself. He endures the man with the same patience as before. He can do nothing about Patrick Green except take note of the man's name, and within the walls of his memory palace that name becomes a business card, embossed and silver-margined. Hannibal slips this business card into the Rolodex that lives inside Francis Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion and then washes his hands of the matter. With freedom comes possibilities. Without freedom he must wait.

His real grievance with Patrick Green has nothing to do with his ruptured staples or his battered dignity. What gnaws at Hannibal is the inadvertent damage the man caused Hannibal to perform on Wolf Trap. In that moment of weakness Hannibal adulterated the memory. He had let a single blood drop fall in its sea of purity. Oh, there was no denying the new version of the scene was stirring, utterly compelling—even now Hannibal cannot help but shiver with the feelings it inspired in him, which linger far longer than the pain and humiliation of his fall. Days pass and he still feels the weight of Will's body cradled against him, bleeding into him, as real as the truth. How strangely satisfying it had been for Hannibal to inscribe his wound on Will's flesh, to pour out his pain into the other man's body; in retrospect he feels he not only succeeded in reversing the circumstances of his evisceration, he also improved upon them unquestionably. He hankers to see Wolf Trap turn out that way again. It would be so easy to slip back into his memory palace and make that little adjustment one more time, just one more time—

No. He must resist. This impulse to alter Wolf Trap is self-destructive and needs to be quashed. His memory is not an unfinished canvas to be painted over at whim. His memory is his masterpiece and it is all he has, so it must be hermetically preserved, locked and shielded from light and air, the dust kept forever at bay. There is space inside his mind for fantasy in all its wild formulations—but that playground is not inside the memory palace. The palace is his record and testament, inviolate, eternal. A man is the sum of his memories, after all. Wolf Trap must remain Wolf Trap.

"How does it taste?" Will whispers into him. A siren call.


	4. Chapter 4

They won't tell him where he's going, but without a doubt he is going somewhere, and soon. Hannibal sees it in his doctors' detached, tightlipped meticulousness as they check him over, recognizes it from his emergency room days as the tying up of loose ends before a patient discharge. They submit him to a final battery of scans and hum with approval over the results: they say he is healing faster than expected. Hannibal is flattered to think so, but he suspects the hospital is simply anxious to be rid of him. His FBI guard multiplies by the day. There are four of them now, enough for a game of canasta.

But the biggest piece of evidence that his hospital stay is coming to a close is what Hannibal feels taking root inside his own body. Even as he lies in bed, splayed like a fluttering insect under four-point restraints, he can feel unrefined strength pooling in his legs and chest, slowly coiling in his deltoids. At night when a syrupy almost-silence descends on the ward, Hannibal listens to the sounds his body makes in the dark, the stuttering of his digestion, the whistle of his breathing, the hiss of his flesh knitting itself back together like a zipper pulled in the slowest of motion. As recently as a week ago, he was sleeping all the time under the combined influence of medication and exhaustion, but now both are reduced to manageable levels and Hannibal finds himself capable of staying awake for twenty-two hours at a stretch. The night nurse asks if he wants 'something to help him sleep,' but Hannibal politely declines: what some people might view as insomnia is in actual fact his natural rhythms finally restored.

He spends these extra hours in the memory palace, though he scrupulously avoids Wolf Trap. A sad but necessary precaution; the temptation to tamper with the memory is a burning itch beyond the reach of his fingers. Instead he haunts more restful moments from his recollection: a library in Madrid, a sunset in San Francisco, his office in Baltimore with a glass of Armagnac at his side and the fire guttering.

His FBI guard increases to six, enough to form a volleyball team.

The doctors draw up worksheets on the cleaning and maintenance of his wound, an exercise regime for his continuing physiotherapy, and lastly a diet plan, eight sheets single-spaced. Marta props it up on Hannibal's tray and turns the pages. What he gathers from this dictum is that any foodstuff with a taste, color, or texture is forbidden him.

His guard increases to eight, a number large enough to man the International Space Station, though these men and women perform no task so lofty. They loiter in his room and in the hallway, trade copies of lifestyle magazines pilfered from the visitors' lounge, and occasionally check the tightness of Hannibal's restraints. With systematic politeness Hannibal asks each of the new arrivals for their name and the name of the institution to which at any minute he might be transferred, but they refuse to tell him anything. Infuriating—Hannibal has a right to know which dim reformatory he might be calling home for the foreseeable future.

Normally he would sic his lawyer on Jack to demand transparency, but Hannibal is between representation at the moment. Carlyle Farrington, Esq., a prominent member of Baltimore society, a self-professed gourmand, and a great lover of chamber music, recently resigned as Hannibal's counsel after being informed of what his client has been serving him at dinner parties for the past twelve years. Farrington's loss, as he will soon see. In the meantime Hannibal will have to find a new lawyer with a stronger stomach.

His guard increases to a baker's dozen, and the moment of his departure has arrived. An FBI-employed nurse sedates him in an attempt to render him easy cargo, but it only gives Hannibal a headache and halos the bright lights in his vision. The attendants strap him tightly to a litter, load him onto a hand truck, and like an antique bureau they wheel him off. Marta and Elodia watch him make his exit, but they don't say goodbye. Perhaps the battalion of armed guards has put them off.

In the van, Hannibal asks every member of his escort for their name, compliments the male nurse on his injection technique, and makes idle comments on the route he presumes the driver is taking them. No one is brave enough to engage him in conversation, and none of them lets slip even a fragment of intelligence regarding their destination. But it hardly matters now. One of the drivers has a BSHCI badge clipped to his jacket.

How thoughtful of Jack. Hannibal spends the length of the journey smiling.

* * *

><p>Dr. Chilton is waiting for them in the front lobby. He's wearing a satin tie in jade green, an exact match for the color of the wall tiles—knowing Frederick, a deliberate choice. He wants to be his hospital personified. And he is.<p>

"Ah," he says, shuttling over to meet them, working his hands in a series of officious little claps. "Mr. Lecter! Welcome back."

Mister? Hannibal blinks. "Hello, Frederick," he says. "How's the gut?"

Chilton's face twitches as if flicked. "How's yours?"

"Much better, thank you."

The orderlies prop up the hand truck so Chilton can look at Hannibal head on.

Chilton's stare is cool and appraising, but it contains no recognition. He looks at Hannibal and doesn't see the expert psychiatrist with whom he often discussed the hard case of Will Graham into the small hours of the morning—and that is just as well. Chilton would rather Hannibal look as he does now: like an animal scrawny and untamed, strapped down and sedated, a pitiable etiolated thing. Better this than the intimidating man he once knew.

"Feels familiar, doesn't it?" says Chilton. "Trading hellos in the lobby. All those times you visited our humble hospital, I bet you never expected to be a patient here yourself."

"On the contrary," says Hannibal. "I have often entertained the thought that, were I to be institutionalized, I would prefer to be sent here. Under your care."

Chilton can't decide if he should be nervous or flattered by this. "Well," he says, nodding awkwardly, "it seems you have your wish. Take him down."

The orderlies load him into a gated elevator that smells of urine. Chilton follows after them, a handkerchief tented over his nose.

"You have presented us with a special kind of problem," he tells Hannibal, as they trundle down the shaft. "Some rather highly placed people in the Justice Department believed it dangerous for you to be remanded here, as your familiarity with this place gives you a certain advantage you might not possess at another facility. But I told them what I'm telling you now: however intimate you may believe yourself to be with the workings of this hospital, Mr. Lecter, I in turn am just as intimate with your workings. I personally assured the Director of the BOP that my history with you gives me unique insight into your psychology, to the point where I believe myself to be the only psychiatrist capable of treating you. And the Director agreed with me."

Hannibal makes no response to this little speech. The elevator has reached its destination; the gate draws aside like a curtain before a show, and Hannibal peers out at the darkened floor suddenly revealed to him.

"This is the subbasement," says Chilton, observing his reaction. "You don't recognize it because you were never allowed down here, of course. Will Graham was here, though only for the length of a single day."

Hannibal continues regarding the subbasement with careful attention, as if he has never seen this place before. (He has.)

"Maximum-security," he observes, as the guards wheel him out.

"More than warranted," says Chilton, "considering the enormity of the crimes you've been accused of. Don't tell me you disagree."

"I don't see how I could present a danger to anyone inside this hospital," says Hannibal mildly. He nods down at his weak and bandaged body. "Not in this state."

Chilton runs his eyes up and down Hannibal, from his bony legs, to his wound, to his eyes. "Hmm. You'd like me to believe that, wouldn't you?"

From Chilton it is a surprisingly penetrating remark.

* * *

><p>Dr. Chilton accompanies them as far as the processing room before leaving the orderlies to their work. The guards keep their plastic tranquilizing guns at the ready as Hannibal is freed from the litter. He can't hold back a grunt—the straps were very tight, the upright position uncomfortable, and his abdominals have frozen up. The strip search is even more uncomfortable, but he endures it.<p>

When an orderly approaches bearing a folded jumpsuit and undergarments for him, Hannibal finds himself smiling. Remarkable, the palliative effect of a familiar face.

"Hello, Barney."

The orderly's rounded eyebrows draw together. After a long moment he says, with palpable reluctance: "Dr. Lecter."

Hannibal is pleased to be acknowledged. Barney has always impressed him as being unfailingly polite.

"You work in maximum-security now?" he asks, as Barney hastily cuts off his Misericordia hospital bracelet with a pair of safety scissors. "A promotion?"

"Just a transfer," says Barney, quietly. "You need help putting on those clothes?"

"I can manage, thank you." Hannibal slowly draws the t-shirt over his head, trying not to put undue stress on his healing abdomen. "You asked to be transferred here, didn't you, Barney?"

"Wanna be where I'm most needed," mutters Barney, defensive.

"Admirable. You always did like being helpful."

Now Barney's jaw clenches, but before he can respond—

"Matthews!" barks one of the other orderlies. "Quit fraternizing with the patient."

Barney drops his eyes from Hannibal's. "Sorry, Hector."

"It's Gornergrat to you, Matthews. Or if that's too hard for you to say, then how about 'sir?' Why don't you stick with 'sir'?"

"Yes, sir," says Barney, eyes still down.

Hannibal suddenly finds the jumpsuit impossible to wrangle. "I believe I may need help with dressing after all."

As Barney pulls the jumpsuit's sleeves forward to give Hannibal more room to maneuver, Hannibal whispers to him: "It's a shame that your dedication goes unnoticed and unrewarded."

Barney doesn't look bolstered by the praise; in fact he gives Hannibal a hard, chastising look, and steps away from him the instant Hannibal is fully clothed.

Meanwhile Hector Gornergrat, the head orderly of the maximum-security ward, snaps off his gloves with a flourish. He is tall and broad-shouldered—though not as broad-shouldered as Barney—possessing a heavy lantern of a jaw and remarkable pale blue irises that almost fade into the whites of his eyes. Altogether he is handsome, but in a brutish way that is instantly repellent to Hannibal.

"Let's get him back on those wheels," Gornergrat tells Barney.

"I can walk," says Hannibal.

"On those chicken legs?" Gornergrat snorts. "We don't have all day."

Hannibal straightens up, even though it sets fire to his midsection. He raises his chin. "You may handcuff and escort me, but I would prefer to walk to my cell."

Gornergrat arches his heavy blond eyebrows. He isn't accustomed to patients giving him permission to handcuff them. "You wanna walk?" he says. "You got it, buddy. We'll walk."

So he handcuffs Hannibal's arms tightly behind his back—murder on his wound—and then around his neck Gornergrat fastens a collar with a long steel rod attached. Barney assists his superior without comment, but Hannibal sees disapproval in his steady eyes.

"All right," says Gornergrat, with a jiggle of the rod that gnashes Hannibal's teeth together. "Chop chop."

With Barney gripping his elbows from behind and Gornergrat steering him by the collar from the front, Hannibal makes his way out of the processing room and into the main hallway of the maximum-security ward. The pace is very slow, but Gornergrat pulls on him like a recalcitrant donkey until Hannibal is limping almost swiftly, trying to ignore the bright sting of his wound. He keeps his head up, his breathing even. There is an ever-increasing tremble in his flanks, but he refuses to stumble.

His eyes are smarting, an aftereffect of the sedative they gave him at the hospital, so it takes Hannibal some time for his vision to adjust to the dim fluorescent lighting of the hallway. He observes the patients in the padded cells he passes, but they are nothing to him but curious blurs. Then he draws level with a certain familiar cell, and he takes in air so quickly it is almost a gasp. There is Will, sitting on the padded floor, straitjacketed and masked with his back to Hannibal, just as he was that night months ago, when he called Hannibal by his first name and put an end to their therapy forever. If he would only turn around…

Hannibal blinks. Not Will. Reality dictates this cannot be Will, and Hannibal's vision is never clouded by the unreal.

The patient in Will's cell turns his head a little towards Hannibal, watches him suspiciously. The patient is a skinny young man with a long equine face. The skin above his mask is yellow-tinged. There must be something the matter with his liver.

"Keep moving," says Gornergrat, shaking the rod so hard Hannibal's chin knocks against it.

Regretfully Hannibal leaves the masked patient behind and continues his slow lumber down the hallway. His shoulder joints are burning now, and he can feel sweat beading at his temples. Barney's grip is becoming more insistent on his arms; he senses Hannibal's strength is failing and he is encouraging him to take some of the weight off his legs. But Hannibal won't be carried or dragged. He will enter his cell on his own two feet or he will not enter it at all.

But the hallway is so very, very long…

"Well, look what we have here," says a voice. "It's the Transylvanian himself!"

Hannibal, with effort, turns his head, and sees Abel Gideon watching him through the glass window of his cell.

Hannibal hasn't the breath to waste on Gideon, so he merely nods a greeting. Meanwhile the orderlies, used to Gideon's provocations, ignore the man completely.

"So is this the new hospital policy?" Gideon calls after them, a greedy shine in his eyes. "One in, one out? Tell me, if I were to phone a friend, hypothetically speaking, would you let that friend take my place down here?"

The patient in the cell next to Gideon— a stout older man with a thick white scar across his drooping eyelid—tells Gideon: "You don't have any friends."

Gideon issues up a long-suffering sigh to the ceiling. "True, Louie. Too true."

A buzzer sounds and a door swings open to meet them; finally they have reached the empty cell destined to house Hannibal. Gornergrat chooses this moment to jab the rod attached to the collar—and Hannibal almost tumbles over the threshold. Barney keeps him upright by grabbing his biceps just in time.

"Home sweet home," says Gornergrat. "Hope it's up to your standards."

Every corner of the cell is padded. The bed, desk, and chair are bolted to the floor; the overhead light is greenish and buzzing. The toilet's tank is broken and refills itself nonstop.

The orderlies remove the collar and cuffs, and it is all Hannibal can do to remain upright.

"Put your hands on the wall," Gornergrat orders him. "Matthews, do the honors."

Barney gives Hannibal a final pat down. As he does this, Gornergrat launches into a speech with droning detachment, as if he isn't actually concerned with being heard:

"Keep your cell neat. That's rule number one. A clean cell is a clean mind. We do checks every morning and evening. Lights-out is ten. Lights come back up at six. Your sleeping schedule is monitored and will be shared with Dr. Chilton, so if you can't stick with our hours then you will be medicated. You get three square meals a day and you better eat them; we're watching that, too. Whenever you hear the buzzer, you stand just like that, hands against the wall and don't turn around or else you're gonna get a shot. Are we clear on this, buddy?"

"I know the rules," whispers Hannibal, still breathless.

"No screaming," says Gornergrat, ignoring him. "Scream at us, we're gonna scream right back and you're not going to like that. Ok, you're all set. Keep your hands against the wall until you hear the buzzer."

Hannibal does as he is told, not because he gets any pleasure from acquiescing to this ingrate, but because he wants to be left alone as soon as possible. The buzzer sounds; the orderlies and guards file out. The door closes behind them, and an instant later the lock slides home with the same resounding inevitability as a cymbal clash at the end of an overture.

With one hand pressed to his wound, Hannibal slowly lowers himself on to the chair. Despite its feeble mattress the bed looks by far the more comfortable option, but Hannibal doesn't want the bed. He knows the other patients of the ward are watching him and besides, he has spent the last two months on his back. How wonderful it is to make this small decision for himself: chair, not bed. So he sits by the desk with his back very straight and his hands resting palms down on his knees. He draws his first deep breath of the cell's humid air: he smells bleach, chlorine, mold, dander, and human misery.

Louie, the scarred man in the cell across from Hannibal, is watching him closely. "Something wrong with you? You look sick."

Hannibal shuts his eyes. Keeps breathing in and out. At this moment the temptation to return to Wolf Trap is very strong.

"He looks starved," Gideon corrects Louie. "What's the matter, Nosferatu? They not giving you enough people to eat?"

Hannibal cracks his eyes open. From where he's sitting, he can just see Gideon peering at him from his cell down the hall.

"My name," he says, "is Hannibal Lecter."

Gideon says nothing. The authority in Hannibal's voice has silenced him.

Hannibal takes one final steadying breath before extending his arms over the empty desk. Gently he brushes his fingertips against the cool metal. With his eyes closed, he sees the stately bone grin of his harpsichord.

A moment of quiet, except for the hissing of the toilet tank. Then Hannibal spiders his fingers on the desk, the metal surface reflecting his pale hands so that a second pair of hands appears to be reaching out of the desk to meet him. Slowly but with faultless control he plays the first measure. Each note rings out more delicate and plaintive than the last, and they accumulate around him, hovering like a coterie of ghosts.

Abel Gideon, Louie, and all his other new neighbors listen to the silence that is Hannibal's concert. They have never heard anything like this silence before. No silence like this has ever existed inside their hospital.

The Goldberg Variations, of course. Even after Hannibal has stopped playing the harpsichord, the music echoes in his mind and in his cell, a fine golden mist of memory.


	5. Chapter 5

Living in captivity is an ingrained skill. If a person has been exposed early in life to the extremes of deprivation, the cold rigors of living always at someone else's behest, divested of one's own privacy, privilege, and autonomy, then the captive's mindset—the quiescent dependence of a broken animal—becomes second nature. Even if such a person were to rise above their humble beginnings and transform their life into a springtime of limitless extravagance, captivity still stays with them. Captivity circulates inactive in the bloodstream, awaiting the winter when all luxury is lost, our freedom stripped away, and in that sudden absence of everything, the native memory of captivity reasserts itself inside us, replicates, multiplies, becomes all we have. Our secret anchor.

So it is with pride, but no small amount of dismay, that Hannibal finds himself falling into the rhythms of the maximum-security ward as easily as one might slip into a bath. He marks time by the orderlies' rounds, eats when they bring him food, dresses when they bring him clothes, washes when they escort him to the showers, and allows himself to be manhandled in and out of shackles. He isn't bothered by the many petty annoyances that surround him: the persistent susurration of the toilet tank, the ubiquitous smell of Clorox, the linen carts with squeaky wheels, the buzzing fluorescents, the inmates' occasional shouting fits. Whenever this last occurs, Gornergrat retaliates by wheeling out an old television and playing a video of a spitting televangelist at top volume. The head orderly must have quite the grievance against God if he believes this enforced preaching is a punishment. Admittedly it is rather irritating. The sound quality of the recording is terrible.

At lights-out Hannibal lies down on his bed. At lights-up he wakens if he happens to have fallen asleep. It isn't necessary for him to sleep these hours away. He couldn't if he tried. It is only the appearance of conformity that is important to Gornergrat. The man is the lazy type of tyrant, insisting upon order so long as he doesn't have to work for it. He spends most of his time playing Sudoku in his office, leaving Barney to do the rounds.

Barney serves Hannibal three meals a day of what might as well be colorless gruel, which Hannibal eats without tasting, thinking of the stuff as fuel, nothing more. He burns it up very quickly, as he spends a great deal of his time on the floor of his cell doing stretches and sit-ups. With his healing wound he must be very careful what he does and how he does it; often his movements are so slow and controlled they appear mechanical. Observing these exercises, his neighbor Louie starts referring to him as "the yogi." Hannibal supposes it's apt. He looks the part of the ascetic, bearded as he is and still so very thin.

The inmates try to talk to him at first. Abel Gideon has been keeping up with Hannibal's press and is brimming over with curiosity. He asks detailed questions about the Chesapeake Ripper murders, wanting to compare notes. ("How do you get the cuts so clean while they're still conscious, that's what I could never understand.") He asks what human flesh tastes like. ("And don't say chicken, we all know chicken doesn't taste like anything.") He asks how it felt to kill Alana Bloom. ("Was it fun?") He asks what Will Graham is up to these days.

Hannibal doesn't respond to any of these questions.

"I don't know why you bother," Louie tells Abel in his thick New York accent. "He isn't gonna talk to the likes of us. Celebrity inmate. Thinks his shit stinks less than ours just 'cause he got his picture in the papers. I know his type."

"I don't think you do," says Hannibal.

This is one of his only utterances. He is even more careful with his speech than he is with his movements. He feels he must reorder himself on the inside before he is capable of asserting his will over the outside.

How had Will coped in his first days of captivity? Hannibal doesn't know firsthand; Alana had insisted he stay away from Will until he had 'time to get his bearings.' Perhaps there had been an adjustment period when the structured rhythms of this hospital were completely foreign to Will. But perhaps not. Over the course of his imprisonment, Will never let on that the actual physical reality of confinement was any kind of burden on him. It was only the injustice of his situation that rankled. Everything else—the constriction, the boredom, the lack of privacy—he simply endured. And Will had the capacity to endure quite a lot. Hannibal wonders now at it. What is Will's secret anchor?

With these questions weighing on him, Hannibal returns to Wolf Trap. He can no longer stay away. This isn't his resolve cracking, or so he assures himself. He returns to Wolf Trap because he must return there eventually and this night—the second night of his stay at the Baltimore State Hospital—is as good a night as any. He is only there for an inspection, to check the foundations of the memory and ensure it hasn't been in any way damaged by his slip.

So Hannibal is relieved when Will slides the knife into him almost to the grip and carves across Hannibal's stomach not cleanly, but with a series of ragged little jerks, each one accompanied by Will's high gasp as if he is wracking himself with Hannibal's pain.

The memory remains accurate in every detail. Hannibal shouldn't have been worried. For how could anything so vividly emblazoned on his recollection—and upon his flesh—ever be corrupted? Nothing can alter Wolf Trap. Wolf Trap is made of stone.

With newfound confidence, Hannibal immediately replays the memory and this time he guts Will with the linoleum knife.

Why exactly does he do it? Hannibal cannot say. Perhaps he is simply curious what will happen.

He is gratified when it plays out just as before: he stabs Will and embraces him and observes the look of naked shock on his face as Will's blood pours down between them, consecrating their shoes. The pain and release Hannibal sees in Will's expression is not a forgery. It isn't role-playing. Even though this scenario never happened in reality, Hannibal fancies this is real in a way that so much of Will's performance in Wolf Trap was not. And why shouldn't Hannibal be able to experience this? Something real, something honest, the very truth of who Will is, intended for only Hannibal to know and understand.

Why can't he have that? Just one more time.

But one time turns into two, and soon it becomes a habit. Hannibal flips Wolf Trap the way another man might flip a coin. Sometimes Will guts him. Sometimes he guts Will. Often he enters Will's little house with no firm idea of how things will turn out, in whose hand the knife will fall. It's roulette of the mind.

Despite being continuously written and overwritten, the memory of Wolf Trap neither suffers nor fades. In fact, to Hannibal it feels even more alive now, more vital with his every roll of the dice. He used to think of Wolf Trap as an inalterable record, predetermined, embalmed. By predicting Hannibal, Will stuck the knife in him before he even stepped through the threshold of his house. Wolf Trap happened the way it had to happen. But that isn't so. Because Wolf Trap is still happening. Hannibal and Will were evenly matched that night. It could just as easily have been Will on the wrong side of the knife. Will bleeding out on the floor. Will prodded by doctors and starved by dietitians. Will living now with this wound, this constant reminder of the man who gave it to him. There is a place in the world for Hannibal and a place in the world for Will, and they can trade those places easily enough. They have before.

* * *

><p>Dr. Chilton hums as he flips through the many pages of his clipboard. He crosses his legs, leans back on the folding chair in a pose of affected relaxation. But this jaunty display can't conceal the hospital director's nerves, the way his voice shakes when he insists Barney wall off the hallway with privacy screens. A pointless measure. The other inmates still hear every word. Chilton doesn't want to be alone in a room with Hannibal.<p>

"How are you settling in?" he asks.

"As well as can be expected," Hannibal replies. He sits at the very edge of his bed with his hands folded attentively atop the hard bones of his knees.

This is the first time he has seen Dr. Chilton since their meeting when Hannibal arrived at the hospital. Chilton has postponed Hannibal's therapy until now, claiming he wanted to give his new patient time to acclimate. But Hannibal knows the real reason for the delay: Chilton was gathering information on Hannibal's mood and habits with which to ambush him.

Here it comes. "The head orderly tells me you haven't been speaking much. I'm surprised, Mr. Lecter. You usually have so much to say."

Hannibal smothers his involuntary twitch at 'Mr. Lecter.'

"I have been conserving my energy," he says.

"For what purpose?"

"So that I might speak with you."

Chilton's eyebrows lift, but he quickly lowers them. Tries to look nonchalant again. "And what is it you'd like to say to me?"

Hannibal is all innocence. "I assume you have questions for me. I want to be able to answer them to the best of my ability."

"I do have questions." Chilton pecks his pen against his clipboard. "Many, many questions."

"Then ask them."

Silence except for the pecking pen and Chilton's nervous blinking. Finally he says: "So am I to understand by this that you have chosen to cooperate with therapy?"

Hannibal tilts his head as if the answer to this question is self-evident. "I have been remanded to your care, Frederick. I am your patient."

Chilton doesn't respond. He looks around at the paper screens, hoping someone might step out from behind them and tell him how to proceed.

"Did you expect resistance?" Hannibal prompts him.

"I…did."

Hannibal dips his head, curious. "Why?"

"In the past," says Chilton carefully, "you have demonstrated a pronounced… lack of regard for the doctor-patient relationship."

Hannibal suppresses the urge to smile. "Have I?"

"Now don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about." Chilton's eyes flash. "You spent a great portion of the last year undermining me. Undermining my ability to administer treatment within this hospital."

"Yes," says Hannibal, simply.

"So you admit it?"

Hannibal nods. "We shared a patient. I prioritized my treatment of him over yours. I apologize for any inconvenience it may have caused you."

"Inconvenience." Chilton's voice grows shrill. "Inconvenience! You misled me, Mr. Lecter. You misled the psychiatric community at large. You misled the FBI. You led Jack Crawford on a merry chase. And that patient whose treatment you 'prioritized' was wrongfully institutionalized thanks to you! He could sue the state!"

Hannibal watches with some satisfaction as Chilton twitches like a fish on the hook. He knows it isn't the State of Maryland Chilton is worried Will might sue.

"Will Graham won't be suing anyone."

Chilton scoffs. "How can you know that? You aren't in communication with him." But the jumpiness in his expression asks, Are you?

"No," says Hannibal, as he lets genuine regret slide onto his face and into his voice. "But I can predict his actions just as accurately as he can predict mine. You have nothing to worry about from Will."

"I'm not worried," say Chilton, annoyed at the insinuation. He gives Hannibal a long, evaluating look. "He certainly predicted you. He trapped you like a rat in a maze. I'm thinking that's an unfamiliar position for you to be in. You so enjoyed playing your tricks on the rest of us. Exerting your power. Well, now it's your turn to have power exerted over you."

Hannibal is amused by Chilton's unsubtle attempt at rubbing salt in his wound. But there's no place in this conversation for Hannibal's amusement. Instead he lets the regret remain on his face, allows it to set up camp there for the time being.

"Turnabout is fair play," he says. "I have respect for the instruments of power. I recognize when I am at their mercy."

"At my mercy." An ugly note of gloating in Chilton's voice.

Hannibal nods meekly. "I can recognize a situation in which my resistance will have no effect."

Chilton watches him for a long while, stroking the side of his mouth as he thinks his little thoughts. "I must admit," he says, "this all seems very reasonable of you. Very reasonable indeed. Patients with your profile usually resist treatment. They fight it every step of the way. Will Graham certainly did."

"I am not Will Graham," says Hannibal, more regretfully than ever. "I think of myself as being a very reasonable person."

Chilton looks interested. "Do you now?"

"Lucid," continues Hannibal, watching a glint ignite in Chilton's eyes. "Perceptive."

"Oh, undoubtedly."

"In addition, I have a great deal of clinical experience. I'm very well-trained in psychiatry, as you know."

"And," says Chilton, "you also happen to be a mass murderer."

Now Hannibal smiles. Which makes Chilton look a funny cross between panicked and delighted.

"I could be a valuable resource to you," says Hannibal. "My mind coupled with my expertise. It seems likely that through an intensive examination you could learn something interesting from me. Something that might benefit the field. Think of it, Frederick. You'd be like Beaumont studying digestion through the opening in St. Martin's stomach."

"Imagine that," says Chilton, voice hushed.

Hannibal turns reticent again. "Though I feel it prudent to issue a disclaimer. You must understand, Frederick, that I am not overly fond of talking about myself. And I don't have the perspective to diagnose my own aberrations with any degree of accuracy."

"Of course you don't," declares Chilton. "That would be for me to do. But I would need your cooperation, Mr. Lecter. Your full cooperation."

"And you will have it."

Chilton wags a finger. "No resistance. No dissembling. No tricks."

Another meek nod from Hannibal. "I will attempt to make myself as transparent to you as the fistula aperture in St. Martin's gut." And he looks up, spears Chilton with a clear, purposeful stare. "…That is, for the right incentive."

"Aaaaah." Chilton leans back in his chair, smacks his clipboard lightly against his own stomach. "I thought we might come to that. And whatincentive were you hoping for?"

"Nothing that would put you out," says Hannibal quietly, "or interfere with my therapy. I only ask for a few creature comforts."

"Name them."

"A view. What I want is a window. I would like to be able to see the trees and sky, or even water."

He makes this request knowing perfectly well that this is above and beyond what Chilton can do for him. And sure enough, Chilton shakes his head.

"There are no windows in the maximum-security ward, and maximum-security is where you're staying. That's non-negotiable."

"Ah." Hannibal feigns disappointment. "I see. Then perhaps something can be done about my meals. The food I have been receiving up until now has been less than satisfactory."

This, too, earns a sigh from Dr. Chilton. "Your diet plan has been specially calibrated by our in-house nutritionist to meet your needs. I'm sorry if it isn't worthy of a Michelin star."

"Ah," says Hannibal, again. He drops his head like a kicked dog, stares down into his lap. "That is unfortunate."

Silence. Hannibal waits patiently for the other man to fill it.

"How about this," Chilton says. "I can provide you with books, newspapers, journals, whatever you need to keep yourself mentally stimulated. That should help make your stay here more comfortable."

"I suppose," says Hannibal, as if these things are not at all rewarding to him.

Chilton keeps going. "I could permit you internet access. An hour once a week. All browsing activity monitored by my staff, of course."

Hannibal nods, accepting this without enthusiasm.

Chilton's brows creases. He sees he's dealing with a tricky customer—and he's not wrong.

"How about this," he says, leaning forward and pointing his steepled fingers at Hannibal. "When you've got your strength back, I can sanction supervised walks in the yard. Twenty minutes, twice a week."

Now Hannibal looks up, all gratefulness, as if a quick shuffle through the gravel in the hospital courtyard is a veritable gift from God. "Thank you," he whispers.

Chilton puffs himself up further. "All of this is subject to your good behavior, of course. Not a toe out of line, or I'll have to reconsider."

"I understand." Then, "May I have sketching supplies? Charcoal paper and pencils would be my preference."

"No pencils."

"Conté, then." And at Chilton's uncomprehending blink, "Crayons. They're not sharp."

"You like drawing?" Chilton inquires, unnecessarily.

"It is a hobby I have always found pleasure in, yes."

"Then the supplies shouldn't be a problem. Just as long as you allow me to see your work."

"As you wish, Frederick."

Chilton's lips go thin. "If you're submitting yourself to treatment, Mr. Lecter, than you had better start calling me 'Doctor Chilton'."

"Oh, forgive me, Doctor. Old habits die hard. Perhaps it would make things easier for me if you were to start calling me Hannibal."

Chilton thinks about it, then nods. "Hannibal it is."

Hannibal allows himself a smile now, faint and unaffected. A successful negotiation, all in all. Dr. Chilton has unintentionally ponied up to Hannibal everything he wants.

* * *

><p>Their sessions proceed predictably along psychometric lines. Chilton sticks to his psychopathological battery, lobbing Hannibal softballs from the Minnesota Multiphasic, the Psychopathy Checklist, the Buss-Perry AGQ, and every other standardized therapeutic assessment tool known to hack psychiatrists the world over. The only part of this that Hannibal finds at all taxing is when Frederick takes him through a Thematic Apperception Test. Chilton sits there like the Cheshire cat, waiting for card Mf 13 to pop up, and Hannibal has difficulty concealing his amusement. But he manages it, and when Chilton shows him the picture of an insensate woman lying in bed with a man standing above her and shielding his face, Hannibal dutifully avoids giving a sexual interpretation. Chilton smirks.<p>

There. Now Hannibal is a sexual deviant in Dr. Chilton's book. He expects he shall have no trouble from the hospital director for the foreseeable future.

* * *

><p>Barney approaches the glass with a bundle in his arms.<p>

"Ah, Barney. Is that what I think it is?"

Hannibal lays on his pillow the faded copy of Dumas's Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine. He steps up to the glass, reaches through the food slot, and takes from Barney the plastic-wrapped package of drawing paper and the Conté crayons.

"These will do nicely," he tells him. "Thank you." He deposits the supplies on the only clear spot left on his desk.

Barney surveys Hannibal's cell, now lined with privileges: books and journals, a reading light, unscented hand soap, an electric razor.

"Anything else we can get you?" Barney asks. "Turndown service? A mint?" These questions rather thrum with hostility.

Hannibal raises his eyebrows slowly. He sits down at his desk and examines the orderly with careful attention. "You don't like me much, do you, Barney?"

"It's not my job to like you, sir."

"Not your job to hold a grudge, either."

"Got no grudge against you, Dr. Lecter. You're here where you belong, and I'm glad for it." With this, Barney turns to leave.

Hannibal lets him take two steps before addressing his back: "You had a hand in putting me here. And yet I don't hold it against you. You might offer me the same consideration."

Barney stops, turns, looks at Hannibal long and hard. "Will Graham caught you." Hannibal notes the barest hint of pride in Barney's voice. "I had nothing to do with that."

"You gave Will Graham a phone. Every event that followed, the good and the bad, can be traced back to you. And your act of kindness. The first of the falling dominos."

Barney's eyebrows draw together. He says nothing.

"You've never thought of it that way before," Hannibal says, staring right into him. "That you might be responsible for all of it."

"You're responsible for it, Dr. Lecter," Barney says, quietly.

"Why did you give him the phone, Barney? Why did you trust Will Graham, when almost no one else did?"

Hannibal can't keep the roughened curiosity out of his voice. The ward lights are dimmed for the night, and in that gloom his eyes—which due to weight loss are larger in his face—seem to glow.

Barney stays steady underneath this stare, but it's a close thing. "I don't really know," he says, a little shake in his voice. "I just had a feeling about him. I have a feeling about you, too."

Hannibal tilts his head like a lizard. "Pray tell."

"You're playing nice now. Just like you used to play nice, back when you were on the outside. Bringing food for the FBI agents, always so polite. Dr. Chilton might be fooled by it, but I'm not. You're a mean dog, Dr. Lecter, who only wags his tail to get people to come in close enough to bite."

Hannibal smiles, very very slowly. A chill in the air. "I am not the one who bites, Barney. As you should well remember. Good night to you."

* * *

><p>"Try not to move," Hannibal tells Alana, for the second time.<p>

"Sorry," she mutters, eyes twisting up. "Crick in my neck."

"You're tensing your shoulders. It all becomes much easier if you relax."

She tries for his sake. Rolls her neck a little, then settles back down. But Hannibal can still see the tension in her toes, flexing rhythmically against the pooled sheet on the bed. He doesn't correct her on the toes. He likes them that way.

"This doesn't come very naturally to me," Alana says.

He carefully smudges a line of charcoal with the pad of his thumb. "Being looked at? Having your beauty openly appreciated?"

"Being still," she says, giving him a look.

"You've never been one for sitting still. Too many projects commanding your attention. Too many causes to champion."

This makes her sigh. A warning to him. Hannibal moves on.

"But stillness can offer us perspective," he says. "And peace of mind."

The candlelight reflects in Alana's eyes like fairy lights upon a fen. In his drawing Hannibal is attempting to do justice to this effect, with limited success.

"Is that what drawing offers you?" she asks, with a touch of sarcasm. "Perspective and peace of mind?"

"Sometimes. At other times, it's simply a good excuse to appreciate beauty in its purest form."

Alana presses her face down on the mattress. "You've got to stop calling me beautiful."

"Only if you stop moving. Please."

She looks up, a little flushed, smiling teasingly. "All right, all right. I'll try."

Oh, he likes that blush. Now he wishes he were working with color, to capture the delicate pink of the blood underneath her skin. Oils. Maybe watercolor. But he dislikes paint as a rule; it doesn't afford him adequate control.

He had worked with color in the rose garden. Dark reds, deadened whites. Dramatic splashes of hue and shine—and his control over them had been complete.

Hannibal dismisses this thought. Not the time.

"When did you learn to draw?" Alana suddenly asks him. "Did someone teach you?"

He looks up, catches her watching him. Knows she sees his hesitation, now familiar to her from other occasions when she has questioned him about his early history.

"I always demonstrated an aptitude for it, even when I was too young to speak. I remember drawing pictures with my fingertips in the snow in my parents' garden. But I took lessons later, as a teenager in Paris. Figure drawing."

Alana raises her eyebrows. "No shortage of figures to draw in Paris."

Hannibal lets himself smile at this. "Live models made me nervous. I was sixteen and self-conscious. I preferred unmoving subjects."

She looks up at the ceiling, trying to see Hannibal at sixteen. "I can't imagine you were ever self-conscious," she admits. "So what did you like drawing? Landscapes? Bowls of fruit?"

"No. Paintings. I went to the Louvre nearly every day to sketch them. Once I even snuck in after visiting hours."

Alana can't help it: she shifts on the bed, her ribs suddenly visible along her naked side as she draws a breath. "You broke into the Louvre?"

"You make me sound like a criminal." Hannibal's eyes are on the busy shading of her thigh. "I befriended a guard. He let me in through a service door. He took me through the back rooms where they store all the art in their collection not currently on display. An incredible sight."

"I've always wanted to be in a museum at night," says Alana. She looks more relaxed now, holding her pose without difficulty. "Wandering through the dark galleries, alone with the art. It's been a dream of mine ever since I was little, when I read From The Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler."

"I'm not familiar."

"It's a children's book. About a little girl and her brother who run away from home to live inside the Met. They sleep every night in one of the antique beds. I loved that."

"Living inside a museum," he muses. "In constant, intimate communion with the past. An attractive idea."

"Were you tempted to steal anything? While you were unsupervised inside the Louvre?"

He hums with amusement. "No. Though Nike of Samothrace would make a beautiful addition to my bedroom, don't you think?"

"Yes." Alana gives him a little dig of a smile. "If only you could have smuggled it out under your coat."

"A missed opportunity." Then he says, "Don't push it back," as Alana is about to sweep a stray lock of hair out of her eyes. "Stay just like that."

She obeys him easily now, no resistance. When she lets her guard down, she is moldable as clay.

"I've never understood the point of stealing art," she says. "I met someone in Art Crime at an FBI event once, and she explained it to me fairly well—that thieves like art because it's portable capital, easy to use as collateral—but I still don't really see the value in it from a collector's perspective. Imagine owning a Picasso you can't show to anyone."

"You can look at it," says Hannibal. "For as long as you like, at any time you desire. There's value in that, isn't there? Pleasure, too, I imagine, in hoarding something beautiful just for yourself. A secret to keep from the entire world."

A smile breaks over Alana's face and suddenly she is laughing, a laugh that shakes her whole body on the bed. Hannibal doesn't remind her not to move. He sits in his winged armchair, drawing board momentarily forgotten on his knees, and simply watches her appreciatively, his eyes sliding like clear water over every inch of her skin.

"Oh no," she says. "Is this you building up to telling me you have Nike of Samothrace stashed in your basement?"

He smiles at her indulgently. "I don't have a basement." Then, "Would you like to see it?"

She stops laughing. "You're finished?"

"Oh, I could keep working for hours, changing every little detail. It is as finished as it needs to be."

He turns the drawing board around. He watches the expression on Alana's face: the curiosity, the faint embarrassment, the erotic thrill of seeing herself the way Hannibal sees her. She doesn't quite recognize herself in the drawing. But on some level she wishes she could.

She draws the sheet up over her body as she finishes looking at it.

"It's…well." She swallows. "I think you've flattered me."

"Never," he says, sincerely.

"Is this a present for me?"

Hannibal considers it. Has a better idea. "If you don't mind, I would like to keep it."

She breathes a sigh of relief. "Please do."

He clips it to the drawing board, and then places it on the floor near the bed. He'll later spray it with a fixative, make sure it doesn't smudge.

"Hang it next to Nike," says Alana, and she beckons him to slip under the covers with her.

He stops the memory at this point. Leaves his bedroom, steps out from Artemisia Gentileschi's Sleeping Venus, crosses the Baroque gallery, exits through the main exhibit hall and the foyer beyond it. Eases himself out of his palace and back into his cell in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

He looks down at the work spread across the desk. The drawing is a very good reproduction: the lines denoting Alana's hair are particularly fine, assured and flowing just as he remembers them. He touches the drawing with his blackened fingertips, smoothing out the contour of Alana's cheek.

Not quite the original, but close enough.

He wedges it underneath his mattress.


	6. Chapter 6

**HANNIBAL THE CANNIBAL TRANSFERRED TO HIGH-SECURITY PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL** … In an ironic reversal, the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane also happens to be the same facility that housed falsely-accused FBI profiler Will Graham for eight months last year … A spokesman for the FBI assured reporters that Hannibal the Cannibal will still be "prosecuted to the full extent of the law" … Lecter is expected to be charged with "at least fifty" counts of murder in addition to "other felonies we are still investigating" … "We don't currently believe this man is suffering from a mental illness…"

**NOTORIOUS CANNIBAL "SPARKLING CONVERSATIONALIST" AT DINNER PARTIES **… Society columnist speaks out on infamous Lecter dinners: "People are frightened to come forward, but it's common knowledge that anyone who's anyone in Baltimore has eaten at his table" ... "once served a salad containing what he claimed were sheep's brains; while we ate it he made a joke about how much he'd enjoy a piece of _my_ mind" … "I'm worried about the long-term health effects of nonconsensual cannibalism…"

**CABLE NEWS PUNDIT ON HANNIBAL THE CANNIBAL: "THAT SICKO…SHOULD BE DEPORTED" **… Scarsdale on his morning show had this to say on the case of Hannibal Lecter: "That sicko from Latvia has been killing and eating men and women on US soil" … "we shouldn't even be harboring him, let alone spending taxpayer dollars on his medical treatment" … "Hannibal the Cannibal ought to be deported, and we should do the same for all immigrants who don't value American lives." When his co-host pointed out that Lecter has been a naturalized US citizen for fifteen years and was born in Lithuania, not Latvia, Scarsdale only replied, "Oh, whatever. Ship him back to sender."

**LOTHARIO LECTER AN "ATTENTIVE AND CONSIDERATE" LOVER, ACCORDING TO SOURCES **... Even after split, "he always sent me a birthday present: a bottle of wine of the same vintage as my birth year" … Tremendously generous and prone to grand romantic gestures … Former flame Loretta Lamarre says, "I never had the sense of any monster lurking underneath his handsome mask, but he certainly cultivated an air of mystery that I found very exotic. I liked to speculate with my girlfriends over whether he might be a former spy or exiled royalty, someone with a tragic past he couldn't bear to speak of"… "He never pushed our relationship beyond that of a casual dalliance. I assumed he was gay."

**MEET THE WORLD'S MOST NOTORIOUS SERIAL KILLER…AND THE BEST DRESSED** … Hannibal Lecter, famous cannibal believed to have killed at least forty-eight people, was well-known in Baltimore circles not only for his dinner parties but also for his flamboyant dress sense … fashion experts call him "a modern-day dandy" … Old World elegance … bespoke three-piece suits featuring rich fabrics and shouting patterns … cutaway collars … double Windsor knots … paisley … "Tailoring so sharp you could cut yourself just by looking at it" … Click here for slideshow!

**CANNIBAL SHRINK GOADED PATIENTS TO KILL** … New information that sheds further light on the extent of Lecter's criminal behavior … reads like nothing so much as the elaborate machinations of an evil mastermind … perjured himself in court on multiple occasions … falsified patient records … believed to have concealed life-saving medical information from at least one patient … may be responsible in part for the deaths of several others… Lecter obtained wrongful access to his own FBI investigation … used his privileged intimacy with the case to tamper with evidence … is currently under investigation for forty-two murders and an additional eight disappearances…

**CHESAPEAKE RIPPER ALLEGEDLY SERVED HUMAN FLESH AT DINNER PARTIES** … Maryland State Police say psychiatrist suspected of committing thirty-eight murders may have been serving his victims to unsuspecting dinner guests … "We're seeing evidence that suggests Lecter incorporated tissue and organs from his victims into his cooking" … Virtually all of Lecter's kitchen appliances have tested positive for human proteins, including a heavy-duty meat slicer, a sausage maker, an airtight barrel for fermenting beer, and, puzzlingly, a centrifugal juicer, in addition to confiscated food items including steaks, cutlets, ground meat, and "foie gras that didn't come from a duck, let's leave it at that" … "It looks likely there would have been more food than just one person could have eaten by himself…"

**INSIDE HANNIBAL THE CANNIBAL'S MEAT FREEZER** … The room so gruesome four FBI agents sickened upon entering … meat hooks … bone saws … cleavers of all sizes … cured human thighs … a drawer full of severed tongues … flesh carefully shaved off the face of a dead teenage girl … "You walk into this room and you're assaulted by the complete disregard for human life on display in here," says a local police officer who asked not to be named. "It's just horrible … the smell … I still see the damn thing whenever I close my eyes…"

**LECTER RECUPERATING AFTER BEING "NEARLY DISEMBOWELED" BY FBI PROFILER** … EMTs: "When we found him, his guts were spilling out" … an eight-inch linoleum knife with a high carbon steel blade (see photo) believed to belong to Graham … the profiler confronted Lecter during an FBI-sanctioned operation … Graham had been released from a psychiatric institution only hours before … FBI Director Alphonse Petersen in his statement this evening stressed that Lecter was the only injury in the tense standoff … "Mr. Graham is under no suspicion at this time. We believe his actions were in self-defense…"

**FINALLY EXPOSED: RESPECTED BALTIMORE PSYCHIATRIST HANNIBAL LECTER IS THE CHESAPEAKE RIPPER **... Lecter on the run, now suspected of having committed at least twenty murders … Framed FBI profiler Will Graham knew the truth … Months of accusations led to noted Georgetown psychiatrist Alana Bloom investigating Lecter herself … brutally slain in Lecter's kitchen early this morning… Graham is believed to have tipped off authorities despite having been locked inside a high-security cell at the time…

* * *

><p>Hannibal enjoys reading his press, although he is galled by how much of the rumormongering is nothing but blind grabbing at straws. But this is nothing unexpected, and even the unfounded accusations are more amusing than insulting. He scrolls through the articles in reverse chronology, fascinated by the way the facts of the case fly apart, the details creeping out of focus the further back he goes. The earliest reports get almost everything wrong, claiming Alana died in a "lovers' quarrel." Freddie Lounds even implies in her very first write-up that Alana might have been his accomplice, a lurid insinuation that makes Hannibal's lips quirk downwards. Miss Lounds, naughty indeed.<p>

But he is surprised—and even disappointed—to see that Freddie's report of her visit to his hospital room is almost completely purged of detail, lurid or otherwise:

** EXCLUSIVE! FIRST PHOTOS OF HANNIBAL THE CANNIBAL'S HOSPITAL ROOM: DOCTORS SAY LECTER TO MAKE A FULL RECOVERY**

The rest of the page is devoted to the photographs: a full-body shot of him lying in bed with his sunken eyes shut, his wound (with a black bar slapped over his groin, how considerate of Freddie), and the shot he requested of his face. The captions are all bare-boned, hardly informative. Freddie has made no mention of their conversation, only describing him as awake and "semi-aware."

Strange. She isn't usually one for restraint.

Hannibal stares into the screen, considering the options, unaware of his finger tapping insistently against the mouse. The guard sitting in the corner of the little concrete chamber watches that finger warily.

Hannibal makes up his mind and scrolls down to the bottom of the page. He leaves a comment:

Your photographs demonstrate a keen eye, but the accompanying text leaves something to be desired. Your story wants fleshing out, Miss Lounds. Perhaps there's something we can do about that.

He signs it: _Modest P_

He assumes he will receive a visit in a day or two, but Freddie exceeds his expectations. Within three hours of leaving her this message, Hannibal hears the purposeful rap of her stiletto boots on the subbasement floor. Stopping in the middle of a chest lift, he refastens the top of his jumpsuit—unbuttoned to control his perspiration during his exercise routine—and gets to his feet, ready to greet her.

Gornergrat walks alongside Freddie, explaining the rules in a loud, lecturing voice.

"—and most importantly, under no circumstances should you touch him. If you have to pass him anything, we insist on soft paper, only soft paper, and take out the staples before you hand it to him through this thing here, that's his food tray."

"This isn't my first rodeo," says Freddie. She is wearing a red-and-black leopard print ensemble and matching sunglasses despite being several stories underground.

Gornergrat looks a little punctured by her lack of appreciation. When he performs a good deed for a woman, he expects her to prostrate herself with gratitude. "Let's get you a chair," he grunts.

"I'll stand." And when the orderly hangs around, looking at Freddie expectantly, she adds: "Thanks. I'm all set here."

"Be nice to the lady," Gornergrat says, pointing sharply at Hannibal, before striding off as if he has very important things to do elsewhere.

Freddie removes her sunglasses. Her pupils contract as she examines Hannibal, quickly taking in his crisp jumpsuit, his improved color, his shaven chin, and the bite mark faded into two purple lines on his cheek. Her eyes linger on his hair, clean but overgrown and tucked behind his ears. Still eons removed from his former self. But he's getting there.

"You put me on your visitors list," she says.

"I did."

"Nice of you." Freddie walks beyond his range of vision, retrieving a folding chair from the storage closet herself. "Saved me the trouble of calling in a favor from the administrator."

"There is no denying he owes you one." Hannibal politely resumes his chair now that his guest is seated. "You pumped air into Frederick's lungs for—twenty minutes, wasn't it? How did it feel to have someone's life in your hands?"

"Yeah," calls Abel Gideon from five cells down, "how _did _it feel?"

Freddie doesn't even blink. She calls over her shoulder, "Dr. Gideon, if you want to offer me an exclusive interview, you'll have to wait your turn."

Gideon smirks at her, but holds his tongue.

When Freddie looks back at Hannibal, the smile on her face is that of one player acknowledging another. "I didn't come here to talk about _me_, Dr. Lecter."

"A pity," he replies. "It's you I want to talk about."

She raises her eyebrows questioningly.

His manner is a little too curious to appear altogether polite. "Why didn't you include any of our conversation in your exclusive report? I never told you we were off the record."

"What makes you think there was anything in our conversation worth reporting?" She tosses her head, letting her hair bob out her unconcern. "As I remember it, all we really talked about was how much you disliked your _nom de guerre_. Not a lot of news value in that."

Hannibal watches Freddie closely. He is surprised by his own feelings: how delighted he feels to see her, to have this renewed opportunity to hone himself against such an unyielding whetstone.

But he conceals his pleasure. Instead tilts his head to chide her. "As opposed to your recent coverage, which has been nothing but scattered hearsay and ephemera. I imagine anything I say to you, no matter how trivial, would have some value. Tell me, how much additional traffic did those exclusive photographs generate for your website?"

She draws in a slow breath. "Ninety-thousand hits in two hours, an eleven-hundred percent increase in unique visitors over that three-day period."

Hannibal nods his appreciation for these high figures and the ease with which she recalls them. "You would have had more if you had published our conversation."

"You got me," Freddie admits, with a tough smile. "Truth is, I'm biding my time. We're still months away from your trial. I don't want to blow my load too soon."

"Anticipating a book deal?" Hannibal guesses, with some astuteness it seems, because she looks unnerved—but she recovers quickly.

"_An Interview with a Cannibal._ Has a ring to it, doesn't it?"

"Derivative again. We can do better."

Her eyes can't help but widen. "_We_?"

"I'd like to keep talking to you. Regularly, if possible."

Freddie's face doesn't change, but she can't conceal the smell of excitement wafting off her person. "Exclusive access?"

"Naturally."

"A generous offer. What's in it for you?"

Hannibal smiles at the sharpness of this question. "As I've said, I consider us to be in the same business. Our partnership would be mutually beneficial."

"And I can ask you anything?"

"You're welcome to ask me whatever questions you'd like. But I may not always answer. I confess I am not overly fond of talking about myself."

He looks down into his lap bashfully, although he is still very much aware of Freddie's mercenary stare burning a hole through the top of his head.

"Then it's hardly an all-access pass," she says.

"It is better access than that granted to CNN, the New York Times, and the Huffington Post. Make the most of it, Miss Lounds."

"And you don't want anything from me in return?"

"What could I possibly want?" Hannibal asks, all innocence.

"How about information?"

Suddenly Freddie's expression is very bright, almost teasing. Dangling before his hungry eyes a dripping chunk of meat.

"Share and share alike," she adds.

_Quid pro quo_, Hannibal thinks. Cautiously he gives her the faintest of smiles. "And what information could you share with me?"

"I have a story for you. About Will Graham."

The name hangs in the air like a plume of smoke.

"I'm listening," Hannibal says, without inflection.

"What if I were to tell you"—and Freddie leans forward—"_that I know where he is_."

Hannibal says nothing, emotes nothing. But this stonewall is a marked change from his earlier affability, and Freddie registers it. Knows she has caught a scent.

Before continuing her story, she takes out her digital recorder, and with the smallest incline of his head Hannibal gives her permission to begin recording him. Freddie wraps her gloved fingers around the recorder as if gripping a lifeline, and begins:

"Will Graham disappeared three weeks after you were captured, and I don't just mean he skipped town. He ditched his cell phone, went completely off the grid. Nobody knew where he was. As you can imagine, Jack Crawford blew a gasket when he heard about it. Turns out our friend Will wasn't doing so hot after your little adventure together, did you know that?" She doesn't wait for an answer. "Jack was worried he had reached critical mass. He put out an APB on Will. Was just about ready to start dragging the Potomac when Will resurfaced—not literally—in Jacksonville, Florida. Alive and reasonably coherent by all accounts. State police spotted his car at a gas station; apparently it was hard to miss with a mangy dog sticking out of every window. Troopers escorted him back to the sheriff's office for a friendly phone call with Jack. I'm told people's ears were ringing all the way down the hall at Quantico."

Silence, except for the creak of leather as Freddie shifts in her seat, waiting for Hannibal to react.

When he finally speaks, his voice is hushed, colorless. "Exactly when was this?"

"First week of November. You were still in a coma."

"Then it's old news," he says, lids like pulled-down shades obscuring the lights of his eyes. "Will Graham could be anywhere by now."

"He could," Freddie agrees. "But I thought you'd appreciate all the intelligence on him you can get."

"Why would you think that?"

"Oh, don't be coy with me, Dr. Lecter. I have a nose for this sort of thing."

"And what is it exactly that you smell, Miss Lounds?"

The stare he levels at her is the blank, cold challenge of an apex predator, half asleep until a moment ago, now considering the merit of getting off its gore-matted haunches for a chase. She returns this stare in kind—not a reflection, but Freddie's own particular brand of animal ferocity.

She asks: "What is the nature of your relationship with Will Graham?"

Hannibal glances at the digital recorder before replying, "I'm his friend."

"You're his friend." This last word repeated with quotation marks a mile high. "Present tense?"

"Yes."

"He gutted you with a linoleum knife."

"Yes."

"Not exactly a friendly gesture."

"I still consider myself his friend. You will have to ask him whether he considers himself mine."

"Oh, believe me," Freddie says, "I would if I could. Jack Crawford has thrown up some very high walls around Will; he may as well be lying at the bottom of the Potomac for all the access I've got." Her bright bird's eyes take on an extra gleam. "Why is he so intent on disappearing?"

"Will has his reasons. Any answer I give you would be mere speculation on my part."

From behind Hannibal's polite mask he radiates discomfort, but it only makes Freddie smile as she proceeds to a line of questioning even more uncomfortable.

"There _is_ an answer you can give me. One I'd find very enlightening. You see, the only thing about your capture that really doesn't make any sense to me is why you were in Will Graham's house to begin with."

He dips his chin, stares at her unblinkingly. The hallway seems suddenly to hum.

"You could have run," Freddie prods him. "You had a good head start on law enforcement, and you are obviously very resourceful. You could have been on a plane to Argentina before you even made the No Fly List. But instead of fleeing the country you drive to Virginia, and spend all day waiting for Will Graham to come home from the hospital. Why?"

A live wire of silence as she stares at him expectantly.

If she wants a truth, his truth, then he'll give her one she won't soon forget. In a voice barely above a whisper, he says:

"You could ask me anything, Miss Lounds. You could ask me why I threw those dinner parties. You could ask me how it felt to hold in my hands the still-beating heart of that poor alderman for the City of Annapolis. You could ask me why I cooked and ate the kidneys of that upstanding young Princeton student. Sautéed kidneys in white wine is a specialty of mine, you know, or at least you _would_ know if you cared to ask me about my cooking. Or perhaps you would rather ask why I sliced Abigail Hobbs's throat in her own kitchen, why I let those black pulses of arterial spray anoint the walls of her childhood home, the very same place where I once saved her life. Would you like to ask me about that?"

Freddie can say nothing in response. She appears to be holding her breath.

He can taste her fear, the metallic tang maddening on his tongue. Hannibal's heart beats steadily, but his skin prickles in a most exhilarating way, as if suddenly too tight to hem him in. He so rarely speaks like this, in words calibrated to shock and appall. The supreme rush of it. To transform himself into the horror she has only written about, never seen.

"But instead of asking me any of these questions," he continues, "you insist on interrogating me about what I was doing in _Will Graham's house_."

And Freddie, brave clever Freddie—far too reckless Freddie—sees his grandstanding for what it is. She pulls herself together, squares her shoulders, and says: "Yes. I do insist. Why were you there?"

The barest hint of a growl in his voice. "To kill him, obviously."

"No," she says.

He raises his eyebrows. "Why do you say that?"

"If you had gone there to kill him, he'd be dead."

Hannibal lets her see that this impresses him, but when he speaks, a warning remains in his voice. "Then tell me, Miss Lounds—why was I there?"

Her voice is shaking just a little. "It could be for any number of reasons."

"The most likely being?"

"I think you went there because you expected something from Will Graham. Maybe you thought he'd cooperate with you, that he would help hide you from the federal marshals."

"You are suggesting Will was my accomplice?"

"I think it's a strong possibility, yes. If he ratted you out, it would explain why he left town in such a hurry and why Jack Crawford is now so intent on protecting him."

"Yes," says Hannibal, without affect, "it _would_ explain some things, wouldn't it."

"You were responsible for Will's imprisonment. You murdered his friend Dr. Bloom." Freddie's brow furrows. "After all that, why did you think Will would help you?"

"I never said I did."

She tuts at him. "You went to that house, Dr. Lecter. Made yourself vulnerable. You trusted Will Graham. And in return he gutted you with a linoleum knife."

Freddie is steeling herself in case these words provoke him again. But Hannibal simply sits there, a soft smile on his face.

"Why do you believe I did it?" he asks her.

"You can't just keep turning every question around on me—"

"I am not dodging your question, I am simply interested in what you believe. You obviously believe _something_, otherwise you wouldn't be pushing me in this direction. Humor me, Miss Lounds. Why was I inside that house?"

"I believe..." She blinks quickly, fingers twitching around the recorder. "I believe…"

"_Yes_?"

"I believe people do crazy things," Freddie says, "when they're in love."

Hannibal's mouth shuts with a snap.

And Freddie stops the recorder. "Well," she says, voice thin with both relief and the aftershocks of panic, "that certainly has some news value. Thank you."

"You're welcome," says Hannibal. All politeness again, though a cold frisson lingers in the air.

Freddie gets to her feet. It takes her a beat longer than it should—her legs are trembling.

"Please make sure you publish this story without attribution," Hannibal tells her, "or I will be forced to remove you from my visitors list."

After a moment of deliberation, she nods. "I don't need to include direct quotes anyway. You barely said anything."

Hannibal nods minutely. "I left that to you."

She looks satisfied. But a moment later—

"Wait a minute."

Now she stares at him. His folded hands, his easy manner, so completely different from the dead-eyed threat he appeared to be a minute ago. Most interview subjects at the end of a session with Freddie Lounds are sweating buckets, fidgeting messes all wrung out of useful information. But Hannibal is dry and careful and intent.

She puts it together. Lifts up the tape recorder. "You _want_ me to publish this story, don't you? You're completely fine with this."

And he _smiles_.

Her eyebrows skyrocket. "You realize if I publish this, Jack Crawford's head is gonna explode?"

"I look forward to it," says Hannibal, cheerfully.

Oh how she stares. She has never been played like this before. She thought she had pried off his mask and glimpsed the real monster—she thought she'd even seen _past _the monster to the damaged little waif crouching behind its bulk. But the only thing she has seen is another mask.

"Any other stories you'd like me to publish?" she asks, tartly, but she can't conceal her awe.

"Yes, but they can wait." Now Hannibal smiles with all his teeth. "Wouldn't want to _blow your load_."


	7. Chapter 7

A/N: This chapter contains a scene of extreme violence, as well as some non-graphic sexual content and homophobic slurs.

* * *

><p>Five days lie between Hannibal and his weekly Internet access, so he is prevented from reading Freddie's article himself. But evidence of its existence reaches him in the form of Dr. Chilton. He holds Hannibal's next therapy session in the Coffee Room, where an electroencephalography technician attaches electrodes to his scalp. Hannibal compliments the technician on her choice of hand and nail cream as Chilton lowers the lights.<p>

A series of images projected onto the wall-mounted screen. First come the innocuous. An eggplant. A tropical beach. A pair of leather Oxfords. Baby dolls. Then—with an ostentatious click of the remote—Chilton proceeds onwards to crime scene photographs, autopsies, battlefield aftermath, the wreckage from an airplane crash. As the technician observes the EEG readings on her monitor, Hannibal looks at each of the photographs with his head canted right, an expression of detached and quizzical interest on his face. The expression of someone viewing a theatrical performance not entirely to his taste but curious enough to keep him in his seat. He has a suspicion as to the content of Chilton's next act.

Lo and behold, the airplane wreck gives way to a slathering of still images pulled from a skin flick. Two well-muscled men in a shower stall, both standing, then one on his knees, then both on their knees at the bottom of the stall as water pounds their naked backs.

Dr. Chilton angles his own chair so he won't have to see the screen. He asks:

"What do you think of these pictures, Hannibal?"

"That tile grout needs replacing," he observes.

"You don't find these images exciting?"

"No more so than the plane wreck." Let Chilton parse that one however he likes.

The truth is that Hannibal is indifferent towards pornography. He finds it to be awkwardly staged and joylessly photographed, the kind of crass titillation that only a boor like Chilton would find thrilling. Hannibal wonders what lewd image Dr. Chilton has queued up for him next.

But the next picture is of Will Graham. A DMV photo, or maybe something off an old employee badge, taken before Will met Hannibal. Will's hair is shorter and he looks healthier, his face fuller and eyes clearer, though the tightness of his unsmiling mouth betrays him. He is staring intently just to the left of the camera lens.

Hannibal knows what Chilton expects of him: outrage at having the object of his fixation projected adjacent to the sexual images. But when Hannibal feels inside himself for anger, he finds none. His internal landscape is empty except for a slow gnaw of something like hunger. This photograph is a record of what Will looked like before Hannibal entered his life. This might be what Will looks like now.

The technician squints at her monitor. How does loneliness manifest on an EEG? What spikes and dips delineate the contours of that old pain?

All the while Chilton rakes the side of Hannibal's face with his seamy eyes. But Hannibal keeps his eyes on Will's, even though Will's eyes, unfocused as they are, cannot stare back.

When Hannibal speaks, his voice is as even and polite as can be. "You appear to be insinuating something, Doctor."

"And what am I insinuating?" Chilton asks, insinuatingly.

"That my concern for Will Graham went beyond that of a psychiatrist for his patient."

Chilton leans forward. "You and I both know it did."

"Will is my friend."

This statement lingers so long Chilton might as well be marinating in it. "And how do you define friendship?" he finally asks. "What does that word mean to you?"

"Will and I share a perspective." Hannibal's eyes have yet to leave the screen. "We were born in different places; grew up under different influences; we possess differing values, sentiments and prejudices; and yet we are just alike."

Chilton takes this in slowly and with great effort. "You certainly have things in common. He profiles serial killers. You are one."

This observation doesn't merit a response from Hannibal. His eyes stay rooted to the screen as he tries to meet those dead eyes, those eyes that won't stare back.

"And you have this hospital in common," Chilton continues. "You have me in common. Only months ago Will Graham sat just where you are sitting now. I'm sure you're aware of that fact."

"I am."

The screen still commands Hannibal's attention; he is under its trance. A trance Chilton is determined to break. He stands up, so that the projection of Will now wraps across his face and body.

"Did you enjoy visiting Will when he was confined inside this hospital?"

'Enjoy' is an inadequate word for describing what Hannibal felt during those precious months.

"I relished the opportunity it gave me."

"Oh, I'm sure you relished it." Chilton looks delighted. "Having Will locked up in a cage, a pet for you to visit whenever you liked. The only person who knew your true identity, and no one would listen to him. He was a pariah of your own making. How exciting it must have been, watching him buckle under all that pressure."

"Will's suffering fascinated me," Hannibal admits. He is staring at the place above Chilton's head where Will's eyes are projected. "But the pleasure I received from his suffering paled in comparison to what I felt in those moments when he fought back."

"And what did you feel in those moments?"

Even Hannibal is in suspense of what he will say next. "I felt… seen."

"You felt understood," says Chilton, nodding. "You wanted Will to understand you."

"Yes," says Hannibal, eyes on Will.

"You wanted him to know you… completely."

"Yes."

Chilton's next question lands with all the grace of a sledgehammer blow.

"Do you desire Will sexually?"

Now Hannibal breaks his staring contest with Will's image. His dark eyes are like two talons latching into Chilton's vulnerable flesh.

"Well, Doctor," he says, matter-of-factly, "on more than one occasion I have thought about eating him."

This remark renders Chilton speechless, as intended. Hannibal grabs his moment.

"I didn't think you were a reader of TattleCrime."

Chilton twitches. "I'm not," he says, fussily straightening his tie. "I think it's a rag, poorly researched and unforgivably sensationalized. But a certain article was brought to my attention, and I must admit, I found it…revealing."

Hannibal ignores the salaciousness in Chilton's tone. "I haven't read it myself."

"But you don't have to. Freddie Lounds visited you the day before yesterday. You were her primary source for that little exposé."

Hannibal neither confirms nor denies this. Which makes Chilton even pricklier. He stalks over to the projector and switches it off. A negative image of Will's photograph lingers in Hannibal's vision for a moment before dissipating.

"Outside, please," Chilton snips at the EEG technician, who is reluctant to leave her post. "Now."

When the door closes behind her, Chilton turns back on Hannibal. At this moment Chilton is so annoyed with his wayward patient that he has forgotten to fear him. He draws himself up tall as he declares:

"An unwise choice of confidante, Freddie Lounds. I expected better from you."

"What did you expect?" Hannibal asks, even though he knows what's coming.

"I expected you to talk to me! I'm supposed to be your psychiatrist here, Hannibal. If you are to unburden yourself on anyone, it should be me."

Though Hannibal has thirty electrode-laden wires trailing off his head, it is Chilton—bug-eyed and gasping—who looks truly ridiculous. But Hannibal suppresses his amusement, blinks back at Chilton placidly.

"I have answered every question you've asked me, Dr. Chilton."

"You haven't told me anything I didn't already know."

"You are an experienced psychiatrist. Is it so surprising that your pre-diagnosis of me should prove accurate?"

"Pssh! You can't flatter your way out of this! The only insight I've had into your mental state I read on . This is unacceptable. I thought we had an agreement."

As Chilton grows more animated, Hannibal grows less. He doesn't even bother with blinking now. "We do."

"Then you'd better stop playing these games. Because those little creature comforts you enjoy so much? All I have to do is this"—and Chilton snaps his fingers in front of Hannibal's nose—"and it's like they were never there. I'll have the orderlies remove your toilet seat while I'm at it. Then we'll see how entertaining you find your stay here."

Hannibal's head is lowered; he isn't meeting Chilton's eyes. The very image of the chided schoolboy. On the monitor, the EEG levels jump and judder. But Dr. Chilton doesn't notice this.

Hannibal has gone away. For just a moment he visits the palace. Stands in the aqueous hush of the main gallery, eyes roaming over his own work, observing the stately profile of the Girl on the Stag as she drips blood into the center of her fountain.

In the outer world Dr. Chilton has reached his stride. "The next time we meet, the subject of our discussion will be your latent homosexual tendencies and their manifestation during your 'friendship' with Will Graham. And I'm expecting you to provide me with information that isn't already plastered all over the Internet. Do you understand me?" And then, when Hannibal doesn't immediately respond, "Do you understand me, Hannibal?"

His eyes go from dull to sharp so quickly that Chilton takes an instinctual step back.

"I understand you perfectly," Hannibal says.

* * *

><p>He lies on his cot, eyes shut, taking great huffs of breath through his nose. The walk to and from the Coffee Room has exhausted him. Now his wound aches in long slow pulses, as if a sucking void has opened up just beneath the damaged tissue. In the muffled distance an inmate wails and wails, ragged ululations never-ending. In Hannibal's cell, the toilet tank drip drip drips.<p>

He reaches up, passes his palms across the top of his head, moving from his hairline all the way to the base of his skull. His fingers stutter over the patches of sticky residue left behind by the electrodes; the conductive paste has an astringent smell. Disgusting.

He is surprised by his reaction to the session with Dr. Chilton. He is very irritated. His irritation stems from neither the indignity of Chilton's insinuations nor his threats. What irritates Hannibal is his own underestimation of Chilton. He thought he could dole out overcooked morsels to the hospital director for a few more months, keep the man salivating. But Chilton wants more from him. Chilton wants the pièce de résistance. Hannibal should have expected it. Now he has no choice but to comply. Being without choices is very irritating. Hannibal doesn't like it.

Against the velvet backing of his eyelids he sees Will's photograph, a faded projection of the unrecoverable past, and his wound pulses more insistently. Hannibal can't stop his lips from molding into a grimace. Will feels so very far away from him right now. Out of reach. Hannibal needs to be closer. To be gutted and to gut. But before he can plunge beneath the surface of his mind, Dr. Gideon calls out to him.

"Sooooo, Dr. Lecter. Finally I understand why you're such a quiet scrawny thing. You are pining, aren't you?"

It seems that Dr. Gideon has read the TattleCrime article. He sits on the padded floor of his cell, curled up against the glass, arms wrapped tightly around his knees. His grin borders on feral.

"Now that's a surprising turn of events," he says. "The Chesapeake Ripper. Pining away for poor Will Graham. Personally I don't understand the fuss. He's badly groomed and perpetually sweaty. Or is that the kind of thing that really—ah—lights your fire?"

Hannibal says nothing. He remains lying on his cot, taking deep slow breaths.

"Well, I feel for you," Gideon continues. "It's a real humdinger of a tragedy. Because you, especially you, must be smart enough to realize you are just not Will Graham's type. The only thing that isn't straight about Will Graham is his shooting."

"What's this, now?"

Gideon's words have roused Louie, Hannibal's cell neighbor. He heaves himself into a sitting position on his cot, squints his eyes, trying to get a clearer look at Hannibal. "Abel, are you saying this guy's a fag?"

"That wouldn't be my choice of words, Louie," says Gideon, cringing.

"Why's that a surprise?" Louie is still examining Hannibal. "Guy's got fag written all over him."

"Now why do you say that?" Hannibal asks, without opening his eyes.

"All the art you got in there. Fags love art."

"Unassailable logic," sighs Gideon.

But Louie is not deterred. "I killed a fag once."

"Oh?" says Hannibal, with pronounced disinterest. "Had the man in question done something to offend you, or were his sexual preferences offense enough?"

A long pause from Louie. Then, in a low resonating voice, he says: "He had a demon inside him."

Now Hannibal opens his eyes. He doesn't bother sitting up, simply turns his head on his mattress so he can better look at Louie. The man has the voice of a Brooklyn plumber and the body to match, powerful long-fingered hands and a round gut underneath his ratty t-shirt. The scarred lid of his left eye is drooping heavily, giving him a look of sleepy fiendishness, like a bear on the cusp of hibernation.

Hannibal hasn't given Louie much thought up until now. He notices the Bible on the man's desk, the crucifix made of folded newspapers taped to Louie's wall.

"I see," Hannibal says. "So it was the demon who urged him to have sex with men?"

Louie snorts dismissively. "Nah. Sex with men, that's human behavior. Natural behavior. Maybe not in your case, but generally speaking."

Hannibal gracefully lets this go. "Then how, pray tell, did you detect the existence of the demon?"

As Louie speaks, a grave sincerity begins pulsing in his voice.

"Well, first I heard it laughing. Its laughs would come out of Denny's mouth—Denny's the man I killed. They were long sharp laughs, like knives. I heard those laughs and I said to myself, 'Something's not right,' so I went looking for the demon. And I found it in here." Louie opens his own mouth, points past his tongue. "Right down here in Denny's throat is where it hid. Whenever he opened his mouth, I could see the little lights of its eyes."

Hannibal carefully sits up on his cot, one hand still pressed to his aching midsection. He sniffs the air.

"Mr. Costa," he says, after a moment. "May I ask you something?"

Louie's eyelid droops further. "Guess so."

Hannibal tilts his head. "Do I have a demon inside me?"

Five cells down, Dr. Gideon snorts.

Meanwhile Louie stares at Hannibal as he scratches hard at his elbow, clearly trying to work out whether he is being mocked. Hannibal blinks back at him, blank-faced.

Finally Louie decides to trust him. "You gotta open your mouth."

Hannibal stands, steps to the glass, and opens up. Louie approaches the glass of his own cell. Gideon watches them avidly.

Again Hannibal sniffs the air: Louie's sweat has an acrid, goatish smell. Schizophrenia.

Louie peers into the black maw between Hannibal's lips.

"Nah. No demon. It's just you in there."

Hannibal shuts his mouth. "What a relief."

* * *

><p>Hannibal eats dinner. Pasta primavera, in theory; in practice it is overcooked penne with thawed peas, crumbling broccoli, and tomatoes that taste of stomach acid. Perhaps the name pasta inverno would be more apt.<p>

The telltale clatter of the outer gate unlocking. Hannibal puts down his fork, even though a drooping tube of pasta is still speared on the tines. He slides his dinner tray until it is flush with the corner of his desk. He'll finish it later. The dish can hardly taste worse when cold.

The low rumble of voices conferring at the end of the hallway. Hannibal has a visitor.

He has been expecting this. For Dr. Chilton isn't the only person riled up by the TattleCrime article. Hannibal had a different target in mind, and it seems that target has finally taken the bait.

He sits down on the edge of his cot. His nostrils dilate.

A familiar smell—and not the one he was expecting. Magnolia and honeysuckle, with the sting of citrus underneath. Distinctive.

Hannibal makes a quick decision: he lies flat on the cot and closes his eyes.

The visitor approaches his cell. Slow businesslike footsteps, then silence.

Hannibal doesn't move, doesn't speak. He allows her to look her fill. Lets her take in his dingy cell, his noisy toilet, his sad little vegetarian dinner. He allows her to register his altered appearance: his emaciated body underneath the prison jumpsuit, the purple bite mark on his waxen cheek, his overgrown hair. What a shock it must be, seeing him inside this hospital. Him on the other side of the glass partition. How strange. And yet not strange at all. Uncomfortably familiar.

"Agent Katz," he says, with his eyes closed. "Still favoring the Burberry."

An indrawn breath. Then Beverly says, "Dr. Lecter. Is this a bad time?"

The way she says this indicates she doesn't care if it is. And yet she still stands there waiting for his answer, a facsimile of politeness. Playing with him as nicely as she can—on Uncle Jack's orders, no doubt.

"A bad time?" Hannibal repeats. "No time is bad for me in here."

Now he opens his eyes. Sits up on the cot, folds his hands on his knees, and examines her with his head subtly tilted.

Beverly looks well. Easy and at home. She has pulled the lapels of her leather jacket all the way up to her jaw, the only indication of her discomfort.

"To what do I owe the pleasure?" he asks.

She opens her mouth. Closes it. Opens it again. "I was hoping I could get your help with something. It's a hard case, and we need an expert opinion."

The words sound scripted. How amusing. Hannibal imagines Jack and Beverly poring over some outdated psychological profile, trying to figure out the best angle of approach. Apparently they have decided on professionalism and flattery. Hannibal can't entirely blame them for this miscalculation; after all, they are without the aid of their chief navigator.

He lets his eyes sparkle, perfectly matches her tone of affected courtesy. "I am always happy to assist the FBI in any way I can."

Beverly looks wary, but she still pulls from her messenger bag a buff folder stamped: 'BAU—Confidential.'

"Three men in Massachusetts, all found dead in the last three weeks. Each of the victims was hanged with a noose fashioned from his own rooftop Christmas lights."

"How very interesting."

"I have the police reports here. And pictures."

She puts the folder into his food tray, but he makes no move to pull it through. He sits on his bed, still as a statue, eyes completely shadowed as he watches her.

"If I am not mistaken," he says, "you have your own people who can do this."

Beverly shifts her weight, takes a calming breath. "We do. They're on it as we speak. But we'd still appreciate it if you could take a look."

He notes her tactful, if impersonal, use of "we." Beverly speaks to him as if he is still her valued colleague. But he can smell in the air between them the sour note of her concealed hostility.

The feeling is decidedly mutual.

So he asks: "…Why should I?"

The words hum, brusque and biting. Beverly has never heard this tone from him before. Her eyebrows draw together.

"Why should you assist the FBI with our investigation?"

"That is what I'm asking, yes."

"It's not a question you ever asked when we came to you before."

Hannibal's eyes gleam brighter. "Agent Katz, I am neither delusional nor an amnesiac; and I assume the same can be said for you. We both know things have changed since the last time the FBI approached me."

His words do the trick. Beverly drops some—but not quite all—of her counterfeit politeness. She crosses her arms, posture caught halfway between defensive and aggressive. "Ok," she says. "I'm just gonna lay it out for you, then. You help us with this case, and Jack will see it as a show of good faith."

"A show of good faith," Hannibal echoes, colorlessly.

"You'll be demonstrating your willingness to cooperate with the FBI, just like you've been cooperating with the hospital staff here on your therapy. The judge will take it into account when your case goes to trial."

"A gracious offer. Tell me, why hasn't Jack come to make it himself?"

She gestures significantly at the case file still lying in his food tray. "Jack's kinda busy at the moment."

Hannibal inclines his head. "Of course. I can't imagine how woefully understaffed you must be."

A muscle twitches in Beverly's jaw. "Are you going to help us or not?"

He says nothing. Merely examines her for a good long while.

Beverly Katz. Will Graham's hero.

There is no denying Beverly is a first-rate FBI agent. She is competent as a scientist and confident in the field. Perceptive, perseverant, and, above all, loyal. Hannibal respects her for the many professional and personal risks she took for Will's sake, for believing in him when no one else would and for operating as his proxy outside the Baltimore State Hospital. At times Beverly's involvement in their game made her a nuisance to him, but that is testament to her remarkable efficacy as Will's little helper.

But despite all these factors in Beverly's favor, the fact remains: Hannibal dislikes her. He finds Beverly sorely lacking in imagination, a personal failing he could excuse if not for her coarseness. Some might call it toughness, strength of character, but Hannibal believes this rough quality of Beverly's to be an affectation, one common to women employed in male-dominated workplaces. Beverly has affected this blunt demeanor—jokily sarcastic, casually callous—so that she might seem as untouched by the horrors of her profession as her male cohort. This chumminess Hannibal finds grating and dishonest.

But it never truly bothered him until he saw the way it affected Will. Beverly's manner was so strong it tended to rub off on Will; in her presence he became as chummy as she, just as crude—folksy. Often Hannibal would arrive for a session with Will and instantly know that Beverly had been visiting him, because he could still hear her in Will's voice, a brazen echo. In those moments, Hannibal had hated Beverly.

If given the chance, he would have processed her into something rustic. Perhaps a pie.

Now here she stands before him, brazen as ever, once again playing proxy.

Hannibal considers his options, makes his decision. He no longer has any incentive to get along nicely with Beverly Katz.

He rises from the bed with feline swiftness. For this dexterous display he pays with pain, but none of it shows in his expression as he steps to the middle of the cell, confronting Beverly head on. She looks unnerved, but holds her ground.

"Aren't you just a paragon of bravery?" he almost coos. "Coming here, facing me. Safe to say I must be the last person on earth you want to see."

"Safe to say," she echoes, tightly.

He stares at her unblinkingly through the glass. "Then why come?"

"I already told you. We'd like your help."

"The FBI would like my help. But what about you?"

She swallows. "Are you going to look at that file, Dr. Lecter? Or should I take it back?"

He talks over her. "I know why you're here, of course. Jack Crawford sent you. And where Jack sends you, you go. That's some loyalty you have there, Agent Katz, but be warned: loyalty begins to look like rank stupidity when the beneficiary of your loyalty so shamelessly exploits you."

She is not amused. Through her clenched jaw she says: "So I'm guessing that's a 'no' to helping us."

Hannibal's upper lip wants to curl, so he lets it, giving Beverly a cold glimpse of his pointed teeth. It is not a polite gesture, but then again, nothing about this meeting is polite.

"You think you can throw me a bone and I'll be grateful? Pass me me a few photos of this two-bit strangler's work and expect me to kiss Jack Crawford's ring again?"

"You want more?" Fear cracks Beverly's professional façade, and through the cracks her anger seeps, darkening her voice. "Jack will get you more. We can contact you the next time we have a case worthier of your attention, if that's what you want. And we can do what we can to improve your quality of life around here. Fast track your requests, get you access to restricted materials. You name what you want, we'll help you get it."

Now Hannibal prowls right up to the glass—and Beverly can't help it: she steps back.

"Jack knows what I want," he hisses. "He won't give it to me."

Beverly's façade has given way completely. She glares at him. "The whole country knows what you want. You made sure of that, didn't you."

Now he smiles at her, widely, until his eyes crinkle. Finally: honesty from Beverly.

"You've read the article," he says.

"No shit."

Her voice is hoarse with rage. Wrought silence as they stare at each other through the glass.

"Well?" he prods. "What did you think of it?"

"What did I think of it? I think that not only are you a psychopathic murderer, you're also an asshole."

His eyes slowly narrow, signaling to her that he is unimpressed by the profanity, but she blunders on.

"I don't know if you've noticed, but you're on the other side of the bars now. You're gonna be locked up in a cell for the rest of your life, and yet here you are still trying to implicate Will in your crimes. Hasn't this whole destroying-his-reputation thing gotten old for you yet?"

Hannibal lets her fury sink into his pores. "I can't say I know what you're talking about."

"Oh, come on."

"I haven't had the pleasure of reading the article myself. When I spoke to Freddie Lounds, I never suggested Will was involved in any wrongdoing. If that is what she printed, then she grossly misinterpreted the little I said to her."

Now Beverly takes a step back towards the glass. "You're such a fucking liar."

The more she speaks to him with her sailor's tongue, the more he'd like to cut it out. But he can't deny he is enjoying himself immensely. He lets his smile turn sly.

"You have tried to control what Miss Lounds publishes. You know from experience it is impossible. Why should I have better luck?"

She takes another step forward. Now there is almost nothing but glass and steel between them.

"God," she says, with a bitter grin, "you and Freddie Lounds deserve each other. You know, Jack sent me down here with an olive branch hoping we could placate you if we just gave you something to do. But I don't think you're ever going to stop causing trouble, no matter what we offer you. You're just gonna keep stirring up as much shit as you can, because that's what you live for. Inside that cell, it's the only thing you've got to live for. I can't stop you from talking to Freddie Lounds, you probably know that already, but I can warn you that whatever you say to her is going to influence the judge at your bench trial, and I promise you it won't be in your favor. So by all means, lie your face off to TattleCrime, lie to the whole world if that's how you get your rocks off, I really don't care. But if you keep including Will in those lies, then I'm going to personally make sure your life down here's a living hell."

Hannibal looks at her. He looks right into her. And with honed precision he chooses his weapon out of the armory of her own heart.

"You think you can protect Will Graham from me?"

Beverly juts her chin. "Yes."

"Will doesn't want your protection."

"You don't speak for Will."

"Neither do you." Then, in a voice so soft she has to lean in to hear it: "I didn't lie to Freddie Lounds. The story she published is true."

"I don't care if it is," growls Beverly.

"Yes. You do."

She swallows heavily, but doesn't contradict him.

"It's your story, too," he continues. "You chose to involve yourself in it. You stumbled in, an unwary traveler trespassing on a strange new country, with no guide except for the map Will drew you. You'd do well not to trust that map, Beverly. It doesn't mark the places where the monsters live."

"I trust Will," she says, through gritted teeth.

"You don't understand Will."

She draws away from him slightly, pain and steel warring for dominance in her eyes. "Maybe not," she says, voice shaking. "But you don't understand him any better than I do. If you really think Will is in love with you, then you are the most delusional person inside this psychiatric hospital."

The lids slip low over Hannibal's eyes. "When did you last speak to Will, I wonder?"

"That's none of your business."

And he smiles. He hears the thread of hurt in Beverly's voice. All he need do is pull that thread, pull and pull, unravel.

"That long," he says. "I see. It's dwindled down to emails now, hasn't it? A few spare sentences every other week, uninformative, avoidant. He may as well be a stranger."

He speaks without taking breath, hypnotic—his tone pins her like a butterfly to an entomologist's board.

"When good Will took his dogs and ran away, it wasn't me he was running from. He was running from Quantico, running from Jack. And he was running from you—wasn't he, Beverly?"

She is staring, jaw clenched tight.

"I wonder why he was running from you," he continues, almost breezily. "How often you must ask yourself that question. What did you do to drive him off?"

"I didn't drive him off," she says, but it's feeble, only a whisper.

"Not deliberately. But you still failed him. You failed to understand him, in a moment when he needed understanding more than anything."

Beverly's fingers twitch; even her eyebrows tremble. He fancies he can see her carotid pulse beating riotously against the skin of her neck.

He tilts his head, his eyes like black holes gorging themselves on her pain, and suddenly he can see the moment so clearly, as clearly as if he had been a witness to it himself. He sees Will reeling, adrift on choppy seas, with Beverly the only thing in sight even remotely resembling an anchor.

And so—a clutch for balance. Oh dear.

"Beverly," says Hannibal, tutting at her. "You could have at least had the decency to kiss him back."

And she rears from the glass, eyes wide. She doesn't understand how he can say this, how he can know this. Extracting this hurt out of her with neither the benefit of scalpel nor forceps. She is horrified. But she is horrified not because his aim is true, though he can see that it is undoubtedly. Beverly is horrified because this shocking display of Hannibal's perceptiveness, his blistering insight, reminds her so very vividly of no one else but Will. She looks at Hannibal, sees Will, and is appalled by the association.

She can't look at him any more. She's off, walking back up the hallway.

"Bev," he calls after her—and how she freezes. "Haven't you forgotten something?"

Back she comes, clearly against her will. He stands right up at the glass, watching her as she snatches the case file out of his food tray with trembling hands. He delights in the way she refuses to catch his eye. He sidles nearer to her and quickly whispers:

"If Jack wants me to stop, then he knows what he has to do."

And Beverly finally returns his stare, hard and brutally cold. "You," she says, "are never going to see Will again."

He can say nothing. She stalks away.

* * *

><p>Wolf Trap: his sanctuary.<p>

The memory has become as familiar to him as the tracery of veins on the backs of his hands, every detail of the scene a note from a song he has learned by heart. The weight of the linoleum knife in his hand. The smell of eggs frying on the pan. The scuffling of the dogs' paws against the wooden slats of the back porch. The last struggling gasp of sunset reddening the tips of Will's curls as he sits hunched in the old armchair, his face in his hands.

"Freedom," he says, with a sneer. "Hilarious, how much you love talking about my freedom. You, of all people, have no interest in me being free."

Hannibal considers him. Into the words he has uttered so many times, he carefully injects as much feeling as possible. "That's all I've ever wanted for you."

But Will only laughs. "You put me in a cell!"

"Yes."

"And you don't see a contradiction there?"

"No."

Will's fury abates. His eyes turn beseeching. Hannibal can actually feel the force of Will's despair, clawing at him. And Hannibal thinks to himself with utter clarity—clarity he has never before known inside the memory of Wolf Trap—this is real.

And it is. It is real. Not an act. Not a performance to beguile and ensnare him. This is more real than Will gutting him with the linoleum knife. For the gutting itself is mutable—but Will's despair? That is a hard fact, unchangeable. Will's despair is the primed canvas upon which Will paints the many false colors of his role-play.

"I…don't…feel…free," he says now, voice gone ancient with pain.

"No," says Hannibal. "You don't. In this moment you feel as trapped as I do."

This is not his line. Not what he said in the record of his memory. But that doesn't matter. He needs to say it, needs for Will to hear it.

Will looks at Hannibal with an expression both keen and blank, as if straining to hear music from another room. Very slowly he shakes his head.

So Hannibal tries again. "You want to come with me. You think you can't, but still you want to. You predicted this moment, you imagined it happening, you looked at it from every angle. You realize that coming with me, leaving all of this behind, is a possible outcome for you, a possible outcome for this conversation. Tell me, Will. Tell me you know it's possible."

Tears shine like evening stars in Will's eyes. "The only reason—the only reason I can't go back to the FBI—can't go back to boat motors—is because you've ruined me. You've ruined me for doing anything else."

Will sticks to the script with mechanical faithfulness. He can't tell Hannibal what Hannibal wants to hear, because he has neither Will's self-awareness nor Will's depth of feeling. This thing sitting in Will's living room is only a memory. An echo in an empty chamber. A reflection in a broken mirror.

But despite knowing all this—despite knowing the nature of the Will he's dealing with—Hannibal keeps pressing his argument. He advances on Will.

"You want to come with me, even after everything. Those tears in your eyes are real. This role you're playing for me now; real. What comes later, your 'citizen's arrest,' that's the fiction. That's the role you're forced to play. Tell me I'm right, Will."

At this point he is kneeling in front of Will like a desperate supplicant. He grasps Will's forearm.

Will tries to twist away. "Don't touch me!"

Hannibal is supposed to release Will, supposed to let him stand and pace the living room. That's how Wolf Trap goes. But Hannibal positions himself against the flow of Wolf Trap. He maintains his hold on Will's arm.

Will twists harder, a high whine in his throat. Tears like silver ribbons down his cheeks. The light inside him pulses brightly.

"Answer me," Hannibal commands, as he traps Will in the chair. "Answer my question. Is this real? Is it?"

Will's mouth opens. He gapes up at Hannibal. A series of guttural clicks in his throat, his Adam's apple bobbing frantically. He's trying to speak. Hannibal leans in, until their eyes are inches apart. He waits for Will to find his voice.

"Ah…" says Will. "Ah… you…"

"Yes?" whispers Hannibal.

"…killed…her."

Hannibal sighs. The script, again.

Will is gasping, but he is no longer trying to pull out of Hannibal's grip.

"You… ruined… me," he continues, hell-bent on spitting out the words he's been ordained to say. "Paint…it…up…in whatever beautiful… images you want… but that's what you've done."

Hannibal's sharp fingers sink into the meat of Will's arm. "Stop this," he says.

But Will's voice only strengthens, picks up speed. "That's what you…always do! You don't make people better. You destroy them!"

"—I told you to stop—"

Will is shouting now. "You are a monster! A MONSTER!"

And Hannibal plunges the linoleum knife into the soft dip where Will's throat meets his clavicle.

Will chokes. Blood spurts from the wound in his throat. But he doesn't fight back. He can't fight back because it isn't the moment in Wolf Trap when he is allowed to fight back. So he doesn't resist, doesn't even cry out, as Hannibal drags the blade down the line of his sternum, then stabs him over and over: in the thigh, in the navel, between the ribs, in one deltoid and then the other.

Will wags his head from side to side. Gurgles. Red froth at the corners of his mouth.

Hannibal's skin feels too tight on his bones. His heart pounds painfully inside him, pulse too fast, maddeningly fast. His heart isn't supposed to do that. Everything is wrong. A low sound in his ears—himself grunting, wheezing, as he cuts and cuts and carves and carves and slashes. Not his usual exactitude. The clumsy gesticulations of a man without control.

"It is real," he mutters, "It is real," as he tears Will apart.

Blood soaks into the worn fabric of the armchair. It sprays in every direction, speckling the walls, the piano, the fireplace, Hannibal's skin. The black puddle slowly creeps across the floorboards as it grows. Hannibal almost slips in it. Has to brace himself on the arm of the chair so he can keep slicing, even though Will at this point is just a pulpy slop of flesh and fluid.

Hannibal sees what he's doing, disapproves of it on principle, but cannot stop.

An unearthly sound rents the air. It takes Hannibal a long moment to realize it is Will, still alive, trying to speak. The arc of the linoleum knife arrests itself in midair.

Hannibal leans close to what remains of Will's face, his ear almost touching Will's serrated lips.

Will says, in between rusty breaths, "I guess…"

Hannibal devotes every particle of himself to listening.

"I guess… I'm a monster… too."

Will breathes a bubble of blood. The bubble bursts. He breathes no more.

Hannibal feels a dark flood of disappointment: in Will or in himself, he isn't certain which. He slowly stands up, linoleum knife still clutched in his red-slicked hand.

He looks down at the mess he has made of Will. The mess he has made of Wolf Trap. This isn't turnabout. No elegant reversal this time, a more fitting or poetical resolution to the memory. This is chaos, and can be neither rationalized nor excused. It is animal desperation merely. It shames him. He feels ashamed.

"I'm sorry, Will," he says, to the corpse in the chair. "I ask too much."

He drops the linoleum knife.


End file.
